Animated Opening Type A tutorial on how to create an interesting animated 3D opening type effect with pseudo-elements, CSS transforms and transitions. The idea is based on Edenspiekermann's Open Type project and it's a very creative way to display and play with letters. View demo Download source In this tutorial I’m going to explain how to achieve an interesting 3D opening type effect with CSS based on the one I previously created. Please note that pseudo-element transitions don’t work in every browser. The Markup The markup needed is pretty simple, just a span that contains the character, but since we’re going to work with generated content we must add a custom data-attribute for repeating the text of each letter. The CSS Let’s add some basic styles to the letter span. Note that we have also added position:relative to the span because this will make the pseudo-elements’ absolute positioning work. To clone the characters we use the content property to access the custom data-attribute.
Using Flexbox: Mixing Old and New for the Best Browser Support By Chris Coyier On Flexbox is pretty awesome and is certainly part of the future of layout. The syntax has changed quite a bit over the past few years, hence the "Old" and "New" syntax. But if we weave together the old, new, and in-between syntaxes, we can get decent browser support. Especially for a simple and probably the most common use case: order-controlled grids #The HTML A semantically meaningless wrapper goes around the three main areas and will set the flexbox context. <div class="page-wrap"><section class="main-content" role="main"> Main content: first in source order </section><nav class="main-nav" role="navigation"> Links </nav><aside class="main-sidebar" role="complementary"> Sidebar </aside></div> The end result looking like this: #Flexbox Context We need to make the container for our columns a flexbox display context. Right away we need to weave the old, new, and tweener syntaxes together. #Controlling Column Widths Our goal here is a 20% / 60% / 20% grid. #Column Re-Ordering
Tetris & The Power Of CSS To be really good at CSS, you have to learn CSS. I know this sounds like a tautology but I've become aware of a peculiar attitude that preprocessors such as SASS are somehow successors to CSS. Some SASS and LESS nerds are fond of proliferating the following aphorism. It should be noted that its author did not himself intend it as an advocation of preprocessors. The four stages of CSS:1. They forget that all preprocessors do is make writing CSS easier, not qualitatively different: It's still CSS that comes out of the end. Put down your classes, ladies and gentlemen, because we're talking about dynamic content and they cannot save you now. Incomplete grids Let's imagine we have a three-column grid but that we don't know how many items will be in that grid. Now, I'm the sort of designer who couldn't give a toss about "pixel perfection" so long as the page is usable and accessible. We could do this by adding some logic to the template and writing a last class to whichever item comes last.
Flexy Boxes — CSS flexbox playground and code generation tool Flexbox browser support Three versions of the flexbox spec – each with different syntax – have been implemented in browsers. The two 2012 specs are roughly equivilant in terms of features, differing mainly in syntax. The earlier 2009 spec is less comprehensive though covers a lot of the same ground. Flexbox 2012 — W3C Candidate Recommendation, September 2012 Opera 12.1+, Firefox 22+. More browser support info available on caniuse.com. Known issues Flexbox early 2012 Flexbox early 2012 (Internet Explorer 10) align-content (equiv. flex-line-pack) doesn't work if the cross axis dimension is set with min-width or min-height Flexbox 2009 Box wrapping is not supported. box-lines is the property in this spec to achieve wrapping, though unfortunately no browser implemented it. Flexbox 2009 (Firefox) Firefox has a number of non-trivial issues with its 2009 implementation: The setting display: box is treated as display: inline-box if there is no width set. Further reading Code and design by @pete_b.
High Performance Animations We’re going to cut straight to the chase. Modern browsers can animate four things really cheaply: position, scale, rotation and opacity. If you animate anything else, it’s at your own risk, and the chances are you’re not going to hit a silky smooth 60fps. Take a look at this side-by-side slow motion video of the same animation: One is done with transforms, the other isn’t. From DOM to Pixels in DevTools When you use the Chrome DevTools timeline you should see a pattern similar to this: The process that the browser goes through is pretty simple: calculate the styles that apply to the elements (Recalculate Style), generate the geometry and position for each element (Layout), fill out the pixels for each element into layers (Paint Setup and Paint) and draw the layers out to screen (Composite Layers). To achieve silky smooth animations you need to avoid work, and the best way to do that is to only change properties that affect compositing -- transform and opacity. Animating Layout Properties
Flexbox Defense CSS Overlay Techniques There are several techniques for creating overlays: from using an absolutely positioned element to outlines and pseudo-elements. In this article we are going to explore each technique's styles with their pros and cons. Design patterns, a set of best practices and techniques that aim to solve some of the most common design “problems”, are usually presented in the context of design principles. One of these design principles is the “Stay On Page” principle. We can decide intelligently when to keep the user on the page and model his process. Lightweight overlays can be used for asking questions, obtaining input, introducing features, indicating progress, giving instructions, or revealing information. When the user interaction is only accepted in the pop-up modal, a Lightbox effect is usually applied and the rest of the page is dimmed, indicating its inactivity. Technique #1: Absolutely positioned element I have set up a pen on Codepen so you can test the result of this technique here.
Text Shadow Generator | CSS3 Generator | CSS3Gen Use this CSS3 text shadow generator to easily add text shadow styles into your web project. Your browser does not support the CSS3 text-shadow property. You can still use this tool to generate the CSS3 rule, but you won' be able to see the results. <div class="error_msg">Please enable Javascript to use this page. Text Shadow Explained The CSS3 text-shadow property is one of the most popular techniques of progressively enhancing the design of a website. The text-shadow property is really simple to use. It takes four values: the first value defines the distance of the shadow in the x (horizontal) direction, the second value sets the distance in the y (vertical) direction, the third value defines the blur of the shadow and the last value sets the colour. While this is relatively easy to remember compared to other CSS3 rules such as border-radius, it is useful to have a generator such as this so that you can generate your text-shadow in real time and fine tune it with Photoshop-like controls.
Techniques for Creating Textured Text In this article we'll explore all the current techniques for creating image or texture filled text and show you how to apply them. View demo Download source In this article we’re going to explore several techniques that can be used to create textured text or apply a background to text. Please remember that some of the techniques covered in the article are experimental with very low browser support, and may not be the best technique to use when you’re building real projects that need wide browser support. I’ve included a screenshot for each demo, the link to the demo in the end of each technique. Applying an Image Background to Text Using -webkit-background-clip: text We’re going to start with the CSS background-clip property and use it to get the following result: The CSS background-clip property determines an element’s background painting area, which is the area within which the background is painted. We’re going to use a “fat font”, so that the background is more visible through the text.
Beautiful Slide Out Navigation: A CSS and jQuery Tutorial Today I want to show you how to create an amazing slide out menu or navigation for your website. The navigation will be almost hidden – the items only slide out when the user hovers over the area next to them. This gives a beautiful effect and using this technique can spare […] View demoDownload source Today I want to show you how to create an amazing slide out menu or navigation for your website. The icons that we will be using are from the Colorful Sticker Icon Sets 1, 2, 3 and 4 by DryIcons. Ok, let’s get to work. 1. The only thing we will need for the navigation is a simple unordered list with links inside of the list elements: The list is getting an ID because we want to refer to it later in the JavaScript. 2. First, we define the CSS properties for the list: The navigation should always be accessible for the user, even if he scrolls down the page. Now, let’s look at the list element properties: For the links in the list elements, we define the following CSS properties: The JavaScript
Circle Hover Effects with CSS Transitions From our sponsor: Get started on your Squarespace website with a free trial In today’s tutorial we’ll experiment with hover effects on circles. Since we have the border radius property, we can create circular shapes and they have been appearing more often as design elements in websites. One use that I especially enjoy seeing is the circular thumbnail which just looks so much more interesting than the usual rectangular. And because the circle is such a special shape, we are going to create some special hover effects for it! Please note: the result of this tutorial will only work as intended in browsers that support the respective CSS properties. We will omit vendor prefixes in this tutorial. So, let’s get started! The HTML For most of the examples, we’ll be using the following structure: Although we could use images here, we’ll give ourselves a bit more freedom by using background images instead. Now, let’s make some hover effects! The CSS Example 1 And now, the interesting hover action!
Dot Navigation Styles Today we'd like to share some subtle effects and styles for simple dot navigation with you. These styles could, for example, be used for a page scroll navigation or a thumbnail preview, in a vertical or horizontal fashion. View demo Download source Small UI elements usually don’t get too much attention when it comes to creative effects. Note that some effects might not work as intended in some browsers (SVG transition, 3D transform-style). For the structure we’ll have an unordered list with links: <div class="dotstyle dotstyle-fillup"><ul><li class="current"><a href="#">Home</a></li><li><a href="#">About</a></li><li><a href="#">Products</a></li><li><a href="#">Portfolio</a></li><li><a href="#">Blog</a></li><li><a href="#">Contact</a></li></ul></div> For some examples, we also use an additional empty list element, i.e. in order to “move” the current item in the “dot move” style. We define some common styles: Hope you enjoy these styles and find them inspiring!