The Responsive Web Design War Strategy It seems like everyone is hailing Responsive Web Design (RWD) as the savior for the mobile site development in 2013. That’s reasonable too, since RWD is currently the only sounding approach that deals with any device resolution universally and effectively. It tries to unite this chaotic browser-based universe littered by the fragmentation resulted from hardware business competition. (Image Source: Michael Schmid, Subtle Patterns) But alas, Responsive Web Design is not the messiah you’re seeking, for it has its own range of imperfections. Since we strictly practice the philosophy of ‘Make Design, Not War’, today we are just here to explore 5 core disadvantages of Responsive Web Design, and the respective arguments and solutions to lessen the destructive consequences that designers and clients are forced to bear. Recommended Reading: 50 Useful Responsive Web Design Tools For Designers 1. The first rule to successful web design: make it as fast as possible. (Image Source: Seth Waite) 2. 3.
Code a Spinning Circular Menu With CSS Don’t be a square, break outside your boring box and try on a circle for size. Today we’re going to build a circular navigation menu that spins to different points as the user hovers over an anchor. Along the way we’ll have to overcome several obstacles like how to structure our HTML to be conducive to a remote hover and how to position all of the elements just right so that everything works. Launch Demo – Download Files Step 1: Structural HTML Before we write a single character of HTML, we have to figure out the structure of what it is that we’re building. Basically, each of the rectangles at the top are tied to one of the four little circles inside of the big circle. Every time I try to pull off a remote hover, it takes me a few tries to get the structure just right. Let’s say that we put this structure into place with the idea that we wanted a hover over the anchor to change the color of the paragraph. As it turns out, this simply doesn’t work. So what do we do? Application Take a Look!
Blogs - Internet blog - BBC TV Channel Homepages: Responsive Design All About Cubic Bezier Curves & Transitions In the last post, we looked at the basics of CSS transitions, including how to use easing to control how your animation flows. In this post, I want to look deeper at a very powerful easing feature; cubic bezier curves. In short, they let you define exactly what path your animation will take, and thanks to some awesome community tools, they are extremely easy to use (No maths required at all). This gives you total flexibility with your transitions. One of the best tools is the free Cubic-Bezier.com by Lea Verou. It lets you make new curves and see them in action just by dragging the handles. The syntax is simple too. The linear part is actually a shortcut though. For now, you could rewrite that line to use the cubic-bezier function and get the exact same animation: That one line can now be used in any transition, and to tweak the animation, all you need to do is change those 4 bracketed values. What Is This Graph? Let’s take a look at the linear graph, and see what it means. The Ease Graph
Progressive And Responsive Navigation Advertisement Developing for the Web can be a difficult yet rewarding job. Given the number of browsers across the number of platforms, it can sometimes be a bit overwhelming. But if we start coding with a little forethought and apply the principles of progressive enhancement from the beginning and apply some responsive practices at the end, we can easily accommodate for less-capable browsers and reward those with modern browsers in both desktop and mobile environments. A Common Structure Below is the HTML structure of a navigation menu created by WordPress. Please note: Any ellipses (…) in the snippets below stand in for code that we have already covered. Our navigation, unstyled. Our Tools CSS ResetHTML5 elementsLESS CSSjQuery CSS Reset Resetting our CSS styles is where we’ll start. HTML5 and CSS3 Elements We’ll be wrapping the menu in HTML5’s nav element, which is one HTML5 feature that we should be using right now. CSS3 will give our menu the progressive feel we’re looking for. jQuery
Perform a Split Reveal With CSS CSS can pull of a lot of really great image tricks: size manipulation, desaturation, even blur. One limitation that we run into though is that you can’t really slice an image into multiple parts. For instance, if you wanted to cut a photo in half and animate the separation, you couldn’t really do it with pure CSS. Today we’re going to code up a work around that allows us to achieve this very trick without an ounce of JavaScript or extra files. Sneak Peak: Launch Demo Hat Tip to Kyle Foster Recently, developer Kyle Foster created a nice little jQuery plugin with an effect that I really like (shown here). As you can see, it’s a great little piece of UI. Step 1: Format Your Image CSS allows us to apply multiple background images to a single element. The trick to pulling this off is to split your image in half in Photoshop before you embed it. The workflow to do this goes like this (feel free to tweak the dimensions): Step 2. This div has two classes: reveal and plug. Step 3. Step 4. Step 5.
Children's Museum Gets Responsive Children’s Museum Gets Responsive by Matt Griffin At some point in the last five years you may have visited the website for the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. If you had visited on your smart phone or iPad, you’d have been greeted with Flash menus that rendered the site inoperable. A couple of weeks ago, we quietly launched their new site. MenusHorizontal layouts are a useful and highly conventional approach to main navigation design. The Children’s Museum agreed that on smaller screens, it would be fine to display the four most important items (whichever were arranged first in the CMS), followed by a dropdown “More” menu. Calendar Calendars often employ table-based layouts. Both views come from the same semantic markup, with events entered by the site administrator through a single point in the CMS. Grid OK, this is where I get significantly more nerdy. And then we can apply column attributes with the following mixin: So now we can simply apply column widths to containing elements.
Create an Animated Share Menu With CSS Sharing is an integral part of the web experience and designers are always looking for new and interesting ways to highlight or show off the sharing portion of their pages. Today, we’re going to build a simple sharing menu that integrates an icon font as well as some animations. The final product is inspired by Disqus, but has a unique twist of its own. Let’s jump in and see how it works. Check out the Final Demo: Click here Disqus Share Menu The idea for today’s tutorial comes from the Disqus comment menu that you see at the bottom of this and every other Design Shack article. Step 1. For this menu, we’ll need at least three social sharing icons. After some searching, I found Socialico from FontFabric, which is free, has tons of icons and is licensed for embedding on websites. Now, to make sure that we have maximum compatibility for embedding this font into our page, let’s head over to FontSquirrel. So far so good! Step 1. Now it’s time to mark up this sucker. That’s it! Step 2. Step 3.
» Media Queries in SVG images Cloud Four Blog “Wait? What was that Bruce Lawson just said?” That was my reaction last week as I listened to the audio from Bruce’s presentation at Responsive Day Out conference. What had Bruce said that blew my mind? It was the fact that you can embed media queries inside SVG images. Maybe this is common knowledge for everyone else, but I was stunned by the news. I recommend starting the video at the 3 minute 25 second mark. The really cool thing about the way media queries work inside SVG is that they react to the viewport of the image itself, not the viewport of the browser. Here is the source from one of the example images that Andreas uses: SVG images with media queries embedded in them seem perfect for the responsive images art direction use case. The examples that Andreas shows in the video can be found at: And I would be remiss if I didn’t also share his post from 2009(!) Finally, I highly recommend listening to all of the audio from Responsive Day Out.
What the Heck Is CSS Specificity? CSS specificity is a topic that many new front end coders avoid for as long as possible. It sounds complicated, there are all of these rules, you might even have to do some math! How lame is that? Ultimately, you can only avoid it for so long. The Core Concept of Specificity Specificity is a funny word, right from the outset it communicates the idea that this is going to be complicated. To break the practical application of specificity down into something that anyone can wrap their mind around, let’s use a familiar metaphor. Who Would Win in a Fight? When you were a kid, the world was a much cooler place. ScrewAttack writes huge pieces dedicated to pitting heroes against each other. There’s this innate curiosity in children to constantly compare things and ask which is better. To see how this works, let’s pit a few selectors against each other and see what happens. And the Last Shall Be First For our first battle, let’s pit two essentially identical selectors against each other. An upset!