Articles

How To Write Mobile-first CSS

Building responsive websites is a must-have skill for front-end developers today. When we speak about responsive websites, the term mobile-first pops into mind immediately.

We know the importance of designing from a mobile-first perspective. Unfortunately, much less was said about coding from a mobile-first approach.

Today, I'd like to share with you about the mobile-first approach to styling, why it is much better, and how to work its magic.

Note: This article will be immensely helpful if you are learning to build responsive layouts with Susy.

How to use susy with bootstrap

Susy is a grid layout engine that was built to help web developers create web layouts easily. It allows us to create custom grids and it does its job extremely well.

One of the common complaints about Susy is that it is too simple, it’s only the grid layout engine. There are no UI kits that come with it, and that slows down developers who want to prototype quickly.

The good news is Susy can be integrated into almost any framework or UI kit, including the major ones, like Bootstrap and Foundation.

This is precisely what this tutorial is all about – integrating Susy with another framework, Bootstrap, to be specific. Even if you are not a fan of Bootstrap, you can still glean insights on how to integrate Susy with your UI kit of choice through this tutorial.

I'm Going To Make The Learning Susy Book Better, And What That Means For You

It's been 3 months since Learning Susy has been released and the support from the community has been wonderful. It's heartening to see so many people start to learn about Susy, and how they have benefited as a result.

I have learned a lot more about what people are looking for since releasing the book through observations, questions and surveys, and I feel that I am now able to make Learning Susy 10x better.

In this post, I'd like to share with you my observations of issues that people often encounter, how I intend to help solve these issues in the next version of Learning Susy, and what all this means to you.

Fix 90% of Your Problems With Susy by Getting This One Concept Right

In the last month, I had the privilege of helping a few people find out what went wrong with their Susy code while suggesting a few areas of improvement.

I noticed one problem kept popping up in the questions I answered. People find it difficult to get Susy to work correctly in nested grids. They sometimes employ workarounds that tweak Susy so badly that it hinders instead of helps.

Even though Susy is built to be extremely flexible and easy to use, it has its own key concepts and rules like all other frameworks. You will need to understand these concepts to get Susy to work for you properly.

I'll like to share one of these concepts with you today to help you overcome a large majority of your Susy problems.

How I Wrote and Sold My First Ebook (and how you can do it too)

September 19, 2014 is one day of my life that I will never forget. It is the day when I sold the 50th copy of my first ebook.

I didn't have many resources when I started writing the book. I didn't have any influential friends, money or experience. All I had was 67 people on my email list. Worst of all, I felt I wasn't even qualified to write a book.

I now understand that it is possible to make something people want, even if you don't feel like you are an expert on the subject.

I'm consolidating this valuable learning experience into an article, which I am sharing with you now.

How to Create Off Canvas Layouts with Susy

Off-canvas layouts have became an increasingly common design pattern for many websites. They are often used to create additional space in most mobile layouts. Quite a few articles on the web have explained how to code these layouts with CSS and JavaScript. Today, let's have a quick look at how to do the same using Susy.

Build Web Layouts Easily with Susy

Susy provides you with the tools to build your own grid layouts that match the needs of your website. It gives you the freedom and flexibility to build any design that you can imagine. It doesn't matter if your design has 5, 14 or 48 columns. Unequal width columns? Susy's got you covered.

Why would you pick Susy over the million other frameworks out there on the internet? You may never even heard of it before. What if it's beauty is only skin deep?

Susy is one of the best things that happened to me in terms of my front-end development workflow over the past few months. It has helped me out so much that I decided to write a book about it to share it's merits with the world. It's an in-depth guide on Susy and how you can use it to easily create any website design you want.

How to Build a Responsive Website That Supports Older Browsers

Responsive websites have became increasingly important over the years. Unfortunately, we still need to make older browsers support responsive websites due to various reasons once in a while, and searching around for the correct way of doing it can take up some of your precious time. This article is designed to help you answer the question on supporting responsive websites on older browsers.

Smarter Layouts with Susy

I chanced upon heydon’s Codepen for creating self-correcting grids with pseudo classes a while ago and that totally blew my mind away. I started to think about how we can use pseudo selectors to create smarter HTML layouts and I have summarised my thoughts on this in this article.

Bootstrap’s grid system vs. susy—a comparison

There are a lot of grid frameworks for us the to choose from while developing websites nowadays. Of the many frameworks, one of most loved and yet most hated framework is definitely Bootstrap.

Today, I’ll like to introduce you to a slightly lesser known framework that has caught on for many people – Susy. In this article, I’ll show a comparison between Susy and Bootstrap’s grid system so you can fully understand what Susy is, and whether you’ll want to try it out.

Creating Asymmetric Layouts With Susy

When I first heard of asymmetric layouts, it was available only in the Singularity GS framework. It sounded incredibly cool and I really wanted to try creating a layout that uses unequal column widths. At that time, I was really happy with Susyone and was reluctant to make the switch.

Imagine my delight when Susy 2 came and it supported asymmetric grids!

In this post, I want to introduce you to asymmetric grids with Susy and show you how easily it can be done.

Understanding Gutter Positions in Susy

One question that was asked in the Susy survey I created a month ago really stood out to me. The question is "how to remove margins or paddings of the first and last column without using first-child and last-child in the grid system?".

This one big question is likely one that has caused huge amounts of headaches to beginners who are just starting to learn about Susy. If we go down into the roots of the question, it is quite likely that you have used the inside gutter position instead of after after seeing the many of the tutorials online. To answer this question, you must understand how gutter position affects your layout.

I feel that gutter position is one of the more important settings in Susy because it causes you code things differently when doing your layout. If you have asked this question before, then this blog post about gutter positions is for you.

How to Debug Your Susy Layout with the Susy Background Image (Even If The Grid Changes)

When trying to build your layouts with Susy, the first thing you might have tried is to output Susy's grid background so you can make sure you're coding the right thing.

I know I did.

But it was tough. I couldn't figure out that out the first couple of months I used Susy. Even if I did manage to find a way to output the grid, I can't seem to change the grids when I introduced a change in media queries. It was incredibly frustrating and it was very difficult to learn Susy during that period.

I'd like to share with you one way you can produce as many grid backgrounds and use them with as many breakpoints as you like to.

Organizing Multiple Theme Styles with Sass

Maintaining CSS code on a website with multiple themes can really be quite a handful, especially if there is more than one person working on the project at the same time.

It so happens that one of the projects I'm involved with requires multiple themes, and there is than one person working on the codes. Because of this, I needed make sure that the styles are coded in a way that they're easy to understand and change.

Here's an article on my thoughts on organizing theme styles.

A Sexier Float Label Pattern

Its tough to create forms that are both clean and have great user experience at the same time.

In an effort to make forms look nicer visually, designers and developers have sacrificed usability by replacing field labels with placeholders. I've been guilty of that as well.

There has been a new convention lately. The Float Label Pattern introduced by Matt D. Smith for an iOS app spread like wildfire and almost everyone is using it now.

I'll like to introduce an implementation of my own, and talk about how I came to create this.

Compass vs Autoprefixer

I wrote about a hacky fix on using the built in Autoprefixer in Codekit 2 with Compass. The article alone wouldn't have been very helpful if you didn't know what was autoprefixer and compass.

This article tries to help you with understanding what Compass and Autoprefixer does.

Using Codekit 2 Autoprefixer With Compass

Codekit 2 is a great compiler built for Mac. It helps you to quickly compile languages like Sass without going through the command line.

One awesome new feature in Codekit 2 is the built in support for autoprefixer. Sadly, Codekit 2 currently does not allow the use of autoprefixer with Compass due to technical difficulties.

But not all is lost if you still want to use certain Compass modules with Codekit 2.

I've managed to find a way and I'd love to share that with you in this post.

Neatly Organized Layouts with Sass Maps and Susy

Sometimes, there is a need to repeatedly declare new layouts as a project goes along. As more layouts gets declared, it can get quite difficult to manage and change these layouts when the need arises.

Because of this, I've been toying with the idea of consolidating different kinds of layouts into a sass map and calling the maps with Susy. Thankfully, I managed to hit onto something decent recently. This post shares my method for organizing layouts with Susy

Static Grids with Susy 2

There are times where you might want to use grids that break that certain points instead of using a fully fluid grid. Susy lets you do that easily as well. But first, you'll need to do a few quick configurations to get that to work.

A Complete Tutorial to Susy 2 (Part 2)

We went through the very basics of Susy 2 and how it could be used to quickly create very complicated layouts in the previous tutorial on Susy. In this tutorial, we're going to dive deeper into Susy, and explore how it can be used to develop responsive websites easily.