Stippling is a classic technique to add shading and colour to an illustration. Depending on the density of the dots, stippling can be used to fill areas or create gradient effects that fade out, while adding interesting stylistic and texturing effects to your work. Traditionally, stippling would be produced by Read more…
Before we come to how to style underlines, we should answer the question: should we underline? In graphic design, underlines are generally seen as unsophisticated. There are nicer ways to draw emphasis, to establish hierarchy, and to demarcate titles. That’s clear in this advice from Butterick’s “Practical Typography”: If you Read more…
The DOM is just a little weird about some things, and the way you deal with attributes is no exception. There are a number of ways to deal with the attributes on elements. By attributes, I mean things like the id in . Sometimes you need to set them. Sometimes Read more…
Listen, I am no GraphQL expert but I do enjoy working with it. The way it exposes data to me as a front-end developer is pretty cool. It’s like a menu of available data and I can ask for whatever I want. That’s a massive improvement over REST and highly Read more…
You’ve created a Progressive Web App (PWA), designed an icon to represent it, and now you’re installing it to your Android home screen. But, if you have a recent Android phone, your icons will show up like this: What happened? Well, Android Oreo introduced adaptive icons, a new icon format Read more…
The landing page for Apple Arcade has a cool effect where some “white” text has a sort of translucent effect. You can see some of the color of the background behind it through the text. It’s not like knockout text where you see the exact background. In this case, live Read more…
I can’t say I use background-clip all that often. I’d wager it’s hardly ever used in day-to-day CSS work. But I was reminded of it in a post by Stefan Judis, which coincidentally was itself a learning-response post to a post over here by Ana Tudor. Here’s a quick explanation. Read more…
One of my favorite ways of adding icons to a site is by including them as data URL background images to pseudo-elements (e.g. ::after) in my CSS. This technique offers several advantages: They don’t require any additional HTTP requests other than the CSS file. Using the background-size property, you can Read more…
Kinda! There is no simple or standard way to do it, but it’s possible. You can change the cursor to different built-in native versions with CSS with the cursor property, but that doesn’t help much here. You can also use that property to set a static image as the cursor. Read more…
Blocks have become an indispensable component for managing content in WordPress since the Gutenberg editor was officially released earlier this year. Not only does WordPress include some nifty blocks right out of the box, but we’re starting to see plugin developers take advantage of them and provide some interesting ones Read more…
