CSS Tip: Use rotate() and skew() together to introduce some clean punk rock to your CSS

I'm still convinced that taking inspiration from punk rock design of the 70s and 80s is going to be a trend. If you want to start small, introduce some angles to your design. This is a simple trick to angle a stripe of content without adding awkward white space.

The 5 Stages of Grid Love

Looking back on the past year, I've identified the five stages of my love with the CSS Grid Specification.

How To: A CSS-Only Mobile Off Canvas Navigation

Mobile navigation and the "hamburger nav" pattern aren't going away. In this tutorial, I'll walk you through creating a mobile off-canvas navigation with only CSS and HTML.

How To: Use CSS Grid Layout to Make a Simple, Fluid Card Grid

In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to take one of the most common tropes of web design -- the card grid -- and make it fluid. 

Make a More Flexible Cover Screen with CSS Grid

Our design trends are about to get a facelift. Grid Layout is coming in the next release of modern browsers. It's important to get a grip on its utility. Let's take a common trend in editorial and marketing design - the "cover page" banner area.

Firefox 52 to Introduce New Box-Alignment Values

CSS Grid is coming in Firefox 52 in March. That’s amazing. It could overshadow a few small improvements that are also coming in the release. The Box-Alignment module is getting a couple new features, as well.

Falling Forward — Rethinking Progressive Enhancement, Graceful Degradation and Developer Morality

Forget what you know about Graceful Degradation. Forget what you know about Developer Convenience. Forget what you know about Progressive Enhancement. Instead of arguing over these terms, we should focus on how to change our culture. Create "fallforwards" not "fallbacks."

Flexbox -- Let's start simple

Layout in CSS is hard. We’ve spent the 2 decades since the inception of CSS battling with its idea of how to lay out content on the web. When we moved from table-based layouts to CSS layouts with floats and positioning, we gained a LOT of flexibility, but we also lost things like vertical centering that tables afforded us. Floats and positioning got us a long way to making really nice looking sites, but with the advent of responsive design and fluid layouts, the struggle has been real...

How to Get Designers to Contribute in Open Source

I’ve been thinking a decent bit this year about how to get designers involved in Open Source projects. There’s more and more being talked about in this vein, and I don’t plan on rehashing what they talked about (The Intimidation Barrier and Open Source Design by Una Cravats and one of the first guiding documents -- The Open Source Design Manifesto by Garth Braithwaite to name but a couple).

The True Gift of Your Former Code

I’m not in the same league as most developers I have the pleasure of meeting, but I had been pretty proud of the little Django app I put together for my old portfolio site. It worked pretty well. I had loads of plans for it when I made it — none of which came to fruition. In the end, it served it’s purpose and I learned a lot in the process.