Articles
Are you sick of procrastinating?
I am. I have procrastinated a lot in my life, and I don’t want to procrastinate a moment further. But, somehow, procrastination always seem to creep up on me when I least expect it.
Recently, I got stuck with a serious bout of procrastination that paralyzed me for two full days. I couldn’t get any work done. I felt incredibly stressed. This incident reminded me about how awful it was to feel useless and powerless.
Having gotten past this serious bout of procrastination, I want to take this opportunity to tell you what goes through my mind when I procrastinate. I want this to serve as a reminder to myself, and also to hopefully jolt you into action.
I think it was a few months ago where someone asked me if I had any pointers to help them transit from Bootstrap’s dom-littering .col classes to either Susy or Neat. It struck me that I haven’t talked about this even though I’ve been using Susy grids for so long!
Anyway, this transition is a fairly big undertaking if you’re doing it for the first time. Allow me to walk you through a four-step process that I use in this article.
I recently came across an article titled “Web typography is broken. Here’s how we can fix it”. A mix of emotions rushed through me while I read through it. I realized that the biggest argument Tom was making in the article was that web typography is broken because type doesn’t sit perfectly on a baseline grid.
On one hand, I was happy to see people coming up with ideas to push code to their limits.
On the other hand, I’m unsettled. I asked myself: “Is there a need to make every line of text sit on the baseline”? I knew the importance of Vertical Rhythm and the baseline grid. I also knew that details matter when it comes to design. But is this one detail enough to break web typography?
As I browsed through the internet looking for answers, I found out that even great designers like Mark Boulton remarked that it would be cool if CSS gave us a pain free baseline grid.
This increased my urge to find out if web typography was completely broken. After all, if a great designer said the same thing, then sticking perfectly to the baseline grid should be important. Right?
Have you wondered if you should use px, em or rem for media queries? I had the same question too, and I never figured it out, not till now.
When I first created the mappy-breakpoint library over a year ago, I used rem units. Then after a conversation with Sam Richard, I quickly switched to em instead because I found out there isn’t a difference between the two.
In addition to em and rem, a popular unit of choice for media queries is the good old pixel. I wondered if it’s possible to use pixel queries nowadays since px-zooming problem that used to exist was now resolved by all browsers.
This week, I finally decided to get to the bottom of this matter.
I talked about using rem and em for responsive typography and for building modular components in two blog posts previously. In both posts, comments about viewport based units inevitably comes into the picture.
I resisted working with viewport units for a while, believing that using them would be a pain in the ass because of the calculations involved.
Last week, I finally overcame the resistance and took a stab at exploring viewport units and how to use them in responsive typography.
You probably heard of the term Vertical Rhythm if you researched a little about typography on the web. It’s one of the most important practices when working with typography. I’ve used Vertical Rhythm on all my sites ever since I read about it.
One day, it struck me that I haven’t had a clue why vertical rhythm was important. Two more questions quickly arose following that thought: “How does Vertical Rhythm improve the design of the site? What lessons can I draw from Vertical Rhythm so I can improve my design?”
I decided to find out why. Here are my thoughts.
One of the best practices to typography on the web is to use relative units like rem and em.
The question is, which should you use? There’s been a longstanding debate between rem supporters and em supporters, believing that you should use one over the other.
In this article, you’re going to find my take on rem vs em. You’re also going to learn exactly what rem and em are, and how to use them to build modular components.
The rating element is one UI pattern that you’ll find everywhere on the web. I found myself building another rating element for the second time in my life a few weeks ago.
Since it’s my second time working on the same element, I wanted to challenge myself to come up with a way that uses as little code as possible. Consequently, I managed to come up with a way to build the rating element with only 50 lines of code (HTML, CSS and JavaScript combined), which is incredibly sweet! This article shows how I did it.
Responsive typography is a tough nut to crack. This was the best method I could come up with when I first started creating responsive websites:
p {
font-size: 16px;
}
@media (min-width: 800px) {
p {
font-size: 18px;
}
}
/* Repeat for h1 - h6 and other type groups */
I’ve learned a lot more about typography since then and picked up best practices like using relative units, vertical rhythms and meaningful typography scales.
These new practices were wonderful. They made my websites look more pleasing to the eye. Implementing them, however, was a horrible experience.
I had to write complex code and I found myself struggling to create responsive websites under tremendous time pressure.
Now, after months of hacking, I’ve finally created a solution that I’m happy to share with you. It’s called Typi.
Typi is great because it allows me to use the practices I’ve learned, and at the same time solves most of the problems I’ve encountered in 3 simple steps. Let me explain these three steps by walking you through the practices I use when working with responsive typography.
2015 has gone by in just a blink of an eye. I realized that I haven’t been taking stock of my life for the past 27 years. So, I decided to do a year-end review for the first time to end 2015 completely, and the begin 2016 anew.