I was ruminating on Sass’ lighten and darken functions today morning and wondered whether there was a way to do this via native CSS. I also remembered that I haven’t ever used HSL to define colors in my stylesheets and wondered whether this was the solution.

A hard disk failure forced me to undertake the painful task of re-installing all my projects and underlying softwares on Ubuntu 18.04. I've documented a basic list of packages that a front-end designer or developer requires to be productive nowadays.

The Input Icon component is greatly simplified by using background images. In this case, multiple background images, including an SVG and a linear gradient, have been used to achieve the left border on the icon.

When a developer takes over another’s preprocessor code, the first thing they are likely to look at is the variables file. Well-commented and well-defined variables set a great foundation for a project of any size.

Published in Smashing Magazine, Jan, 2016.

I've got a course up on Pluralsight, on Responsive Web Design, directly in the browser. It's meant for those who wish to bypass the Photoshop/Sketch layer, and get some CSS chops without relying on frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation.

CSS' clip-path property is your ticket to shape-shifting the monotonous, boxy layouts traditionally associated with flat, responsive design. Once you get your hands dirty with clip-path, there’s no end to the shapes you can generate, simply by tweaking a few values.
Published in Smashing Magazine, May 2015.

You know the trade-off. Use the img tag to display an SVG, and you get clean markup — at the cost of styling the SVG using its properties like fill, stroke, SVG filters and more.

I’m using flexbox in a big way for a web app that I’m currently working on, and I am very pleased with how it handles layout and box calculations intelligently. Small modules work very well with flexbox, and you can use floats and other tools for broader sections of the layout.

Published in Smashing Magazine, March 2015.

If you ask me, the worst kind of bugs are for modules or properties that a browser claims to support, but not entirely so. IE has supported CSS keyframe animations since IE 10. However, I recently discovered a bug in the latest version.

So here we go again. Three demos of pure CSS checkboxes and radio buttons. I generally keep my demos raster free and bereft of extra styling. The reason is so you can add your own styles and not have to override the demo styles.

Woff was specifically created for using custom fonts via the @font-face rule. Every single modern browser has adopted it. So why not skip the other formats and use it exclusively?

Two weeks ago, a designer sent in an app landing-page mockup with slanted buttons. I attempted to do this the most natural way, i.e. using CSS transforms via skew. I skewed the button selector and it worked beautifully, except that it skewed the text as well.

Most grids and front-end frameworks I've seen insist on floats for all layouting. But sometimes, you don't want floats... You may occasionally be better off with inline-block, rarely display-table, and if your browser support is ideal, flexbox. Let's look at some advantages and disadvantages of popular layouting methods for responsive sites.

A few days ago, an eureka moment occurred: why not take Ryan Fait’s solution (which is quite elegant, by the way), and add a teeny weeny bit of JS, to get a footer that works for a responsive layout?

Calc makes CSS very, very pretty. It does the heavy lifting for you. You can mix percentages with pixels or ems, and add, subtract, multiply and divide. So why is calc an at-risk feature? Let's take a look at some real-world use cases for calc.

I’ve been playing with flexbox for a while. I love it. It’s going to save so many kittens. This is going to be the first of a series of demos of what flexbox is capable of.

This articles covers 3 use cases where inline-block layouting forms a good solution. Fluid image grids, horizontally centered menus and borders on elements are discussed.

The Equal Height Problem never ends! It gets even worse with responsive layouts. After witnessing and attempting the mindboggling solutions out there, I was convinced that Javascript was the saviour... until I revisited the situation recently. Here's a pure CSS solution.

When a client calls up and asks to increase the icon size by 20% or tweak colour values and shadows, it’s a breeze to make changes in the stylesheet directly. I've made a demo with 16 different ways you can creatively use font icons in your next project.