Link tags: variable

MD Nichrome by Mass-Driver

Marvin has some competition! Here’s another beautiful sci-fi variable font:

MD Nichrome is a display typeface based on the typography of paperback science fiction from the 70s and early 80s.

CSS { In Real Life } | Quick Tip: Style Pseudo-elements with Javascript Using Custom Properties

Oh, this is smart! You can’t target pseudo-elements in JavaScript, but you can use custom properties as a proxy instead.

Building Dark Mode | Product Blog • Sentry

Robin makes a good point here about using dark mode thinking as a way to uncover any assumptions you might have unwittingly baked into your design:

Given its recent popularity, you might believe dark mode is a fad. But from a design perspective, dark mode is exceptionally useful. That’s because a big part of design is about building relationships between colors. And so implementing dark mode essentially forced everyone on the team to think long, hard, and consistently about our front-end design components. In short, dark mode helped our design system not only look good, but make sense.

So even if you don’t actually implement dark mode, acting as though it’s there will give you a solid base to build in.

I did something similar with the back end of Huffduffer and The Session—from day one, I built them as though the interface would be available in multiple languages. I never implemented multi-language support, but just the awareness of it saved me from baking in any shortcuts or assumptions, and enforced a good model/view/controller separation.

For most front-end codebases, the design of your color system shows you where your radioactive styles are. It shows you how things are tied together, and what depends on what.

Proxima Vara by Mark Simonson

Oh, nice! A version of the classic Proxima Nova that’s a variable font that allows you to vary weight, width, and slant.

What Can You Put in a CSS Variable? / Coder’s Block

A reminder that the contens of custom properties don’t have to be valid property values:

From a syntax perspective, CSS variables are “extremely permissive”.

Times New Arial

Ever wanted to set some text in 70% Times New Roman and 30% Arial? Me neither. But now, thanks to variable fonts, you can!

Dark mode and variable fonts | CSS-Tricks

This is such a clever use of variable fonts!

We can use a lighter font weight to make the text easier to read whenever dark mode is active.

Rise of the Digital Fonts

A history of typesetting from movable type to variable fonts.

A Variable Fonts Primer

Everything you ever wanted to know about variable fonts, gathered together into one excellent website.

Variable fonts’ past, present and future, according to Dalton Maag

In this interview, Biance Berning says:

Cassie Evans from Clearleft is an interesting person to follow as she combines web animation with variable font technology, essentially exploring the technology’s practicality and expression.

Hells yeah!

We’re only just scratching the surface of what variable fonts can do within more interactive and immersive spaces. I think we’ll see a lot more progress and experimentation with that as time goes on.

Recursive | Recursive

Play around with this variable font available soon from Google Fonts in monospaced and sans-serif versions.

Variable Fonts for Developers

A showcase of fun experiments with variable fonts, courtesy of Mandy.

German Naming Convention

Don’t write fopen when you can write openFile. Write throwValidationError and not throwVE. Call that name function and not fct. That’s German naming convention. Do this and your readers will appreciate it.

Making Future Interfaces: Custom Properties - YouTube

Heydon cracks me up—his Patterns Day is going to have you crying with laughter; guaranteed!

Here he is talking about custom properties in CSS as part of his Making Future Interfaces video series.

Stepping away from Sass

I think Cathy might’ve buried the lede:

The knock on effect of this was removing media queries. As I moved towards some of the more modern features of CSS the need to target specific screen sizes with unique code was removed.

But on the topic of Sass, layout is now taken care of with CSS grid, variables are taken care of with CSS custom properties, and mixins for typography are taken care of with calc().

Personally, I’ve always found the most useful feature of Sass to simply be that you can have lots of separate Sass files that get combined into one CSS file—very handy for component libraries.

Difference between currentColor & Custom Properties | Mike Riethmuller

I had to read through this twice, but I think I get it now (I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer). Very useful if you’re doing theming in CSS.

Jongert

Nick demonstrates the responsive power of variable fonts by recreating a lovely design from Jacob Jongert.

Grab that browser window and get squishin’!

A Tale of Two Buttons

In defence of the cascade (especially now that we’ve got CSS custom properties).

I think embracing CSS’s cascade can be a great way to encourage consistency and simplicity in UIs. Rather than every new component being a free for all, it trains both designers and developers to think in terms of aligning with and re-using what they already have.

Remember, every time you set a property in CSS you are in fact overriding something (even if it’s just the default user agent styles). In other words, CSS code is mostly expressing exceptions to a default design.

Transform your type online with variable fonts | Creative Bloq

This is a great interview with Rich on all things related to web typography—including, of course, variable fonts.

I’m so lucky that I literally get to work side by side with Rich; I get to geek out with him about font stuff all the time.

Font Playground — Play with variable fonts!

A fun way to play around with the options in variable fonts.