In the product-focused world of development, it can be easy to forget the joy of making for the sake of making. By dropping the ‘Why’ and ‘How’, and focusing instead on the ‘What’ of weird, wonderful ideas, you can nurture a totally different side to your skill sets. You can read the docs, you can follow the tutorials, but wouldn’t you be more motivated by trying to make something unique, something no one else has seen before? Here’s how having fun can supercharge your learning. Throw a record on, pick a mood, and let’s get to it.
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There is now a specification for native CSS masonry layout, as part of the Grid Layout spec. In this article, Rachel Andrew will explain the draft spec, with examples that you can try out in Firefox Nightly. While this is a feature you won’t be able to use in production right now, your feedback would be valuable to help make sure it serves the requirements that you have for this kind of layout. So let’s take a look.
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Data onboarding with a custom-built solution can be a difficult and error-prone process. Now imagine what happens when you increase the complexity, allowing for different file types, more users, varying sources and a greater need for security and compliance. It shouldn’t be up to your software end users to work out the kinks of your data onboarding, nor should your team have to do it. In this post, Suzanne Scacca will look at how Flatfile Concierge deals with this problem.
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In this article, Edoardo Cavazza will show you how to use face recognition with Tensorflow in order to extract some information from the camera, such as the distance between the screen and user’s face or the amount of people reading the page. Then, we will pass those data to CSS in order to adapt typography and to adjust the page layout.
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All pages of a Shopify online store can adopt CSS Grid, but one obvious touchpoint of any e-commerce site that can benefit from a robust and clean grid layout is the collection page. In this article, Liam Griffin will be looking at how to set up a grid layout for products on your collection pages, and how to use Shopify’s section settings to create customizable options in the online store editor.
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After 12 inspiring articles, Andy Clarke draws his Inspired Design Decisions series to a close by explaining how studying the work of Bradbury Thompson — one of the masters of 20th Century graphic — will teach you how to combine graphic and typographical elements with innovative layouts to create stunning designs for the web. In this final article, Andy brings together lessons from all his previous articles to teach you about choosing color palettes, working with compound and modular grids, and designing graphical and readable typography. If you’ve skipped any of the articles in this series, you definitely won’t want to miss this one.
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Splitting colors into three levels (palette, functional, and component) can help you be more adaptive to changes and new requirements while working on a project. In this article, Artur Basak introduces a modern approach on how to set up CSS Custom Properties that respond to the application colors. The idea of dividing colors into three levels can be quite useful: a palette (or scheme), functional colors (or theme), and component colors (local scope).
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Emmett McBain was a Black American graphic designer whose work had a remarkable impact on the representation of Black Americans in advertising. He co-founded what became the biggest Black-owned agency in the USA. McBain designed almost 75 record covers by the time he was 24, and in the penultimate of his Inspired Design Decisions series, Andy Clarke will explain how his work can inspire what we design for the web.
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Styled components are “visual primitives for components”, and their goal is to give us a flexible way to style components. The result is a tight coupling between components and their styles. While the component-driven approach has ushered in a new frontier in the way we build web applications, it isn’t without its imperfections — one being its usability and scalability with CSS. This has given birth to a new way to construct and manage our styles in a component-specific manner, otherwise knows as CSS-in-JS.
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Which aspects should we take into consideration when designing and developing for reading? How can we create accessible, comfortable, inclusive experiences for all readers, including the most challenged and those affected by dyslexia? In this article, Edoardo Cavazza will cover how we can improve websites legibility using some modern CSS techniques, great new technologies like variable fonts and putting into practise what we learned from doing scientific researches.
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