Articles

Have you ever come across a site where light text is sitting on a light background image? If you have, you’ll know how difficult that is to read. A popular way to avoid that is to use a transparent overlay. But this leads to an important question: Just how transparent should that overlay be? It’s not like we’re always dealing with the same font sizes, weights, and colors, and, of course, different images will result in different contrasts.

Trying … Read article “Nailing the Perfect Contrast Between Light Text and a Background Image”

You can make a typical CSS border dashed or dotted. For example:

.box {
   border: 1px dashed black;
   border: 3px dotted red;
}

You don’t have all that much control over how big or long the dashes or gaps are. And you certainly can’t give the dashes slants, fading, or animation! You can do those things with some trickery though.… Read article “More Control Over CSS Borders With background-image”

Every website that’s made me oooo and aaahhh lately has been of a special kind; they’re written and designed like essays. There’s an argument, a playfulness in the way that they’re not so much selling me something as they are trying to convince me of the thing. They use words and type and color in a way that makes me sit up and listen.

And I think that framing our work in this way lets us web designers explore exciting … Read article “Every Website is an Essay”

Tomáš Janoušek:

Many web pages these days set font-weight: 300 in their stylesheet. With DejaVu Sans as my preferred font, this results in very thin and light text that is hard to read, because for some reason the “DejaVu Sans ExtraLight” variant (weight 200) is being used for weights < 360 (in Chrome; in Firefox up to 399). Let’s investigate why this happens and what can be done about it.

Let’s say you have a double heading situation going on. A little one on top of a big one. It comes up, I dunno, a billion times a day, I’d say. What HTML do you go for? Dare I say, it depends? But have you considered all the options? And how those options play out semantically and accessibility-y?

As we do around here sometimes, let’s take a stroll through the options.… Read article “HTML for Subheadings and Headings”

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the last several years (and let’s face it, hiding under a rock sometimes feels like the right thing to do), you’ve probably heard of and likely used TypeScript. TypeScript is a syntactical superset of JavaScript that adds — as its name suggests — typing to the web’s favorite scripting language.

TypeScript is incredibly powerful, but is often difficult to read for beginners and carries the overhead of needing a compilation step before … Read article “TypeScript, Minus TypeScript”