Robin Rendle

Dark mode designs are all the rage right now but here’s an interesting take: Wei Gao has built a night mode on her own site that uses mix-blend-mode: difference to create an effect that looks like this:

Wei explains how she implemented this technique and the edge cases she encountered along the way. I especially love what she had to say about mix-blend-mode functions here:

I remember first playing around with them in Photoshop years ago. Now that browsers are

Greg Kohn looks at how to use Purgecss — a tool that helps remove unused styles — and Tailwind — a utility-based CSS framework — and why we might want to pair these tools together:

Tailwind, by intention, is aiming to equip you with an arsenal of utility classes by generating more than you need. There are some best practices which will help keep this overall build size down, like limiting your colors and breakpoints or turning off the modules

Google announced at I/O that their font service will now support the font-display property which resolves a number of web performance issues. If you're hearing cries of joy, that's probably Chris as he punches the air in celebration. He's wanted this feature for some time and suggests that all @font-face blocks ought to consider using the property.

Zach Leatherman has the lowdown:

This is big news—it means developers now have more control over Google Fonts web font loading behavior.

Andy Bell made a really cool demo that shows us how to create a responsive grid layout without any media queries at all. It happens to look like this when you change the size of the browser window:

I think this is a wonderful layout technique that’s just 6 lines (!) of CSS.

.auto-grid {
  --auto-grid-min-size: 16rem;
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fill, minmax(var(--auto-grid-min-size), 1fr));
  grid-gap: 1rem;
}

What this shows us is that we don’t have to write a million media … Read article

Chris Zacharias published a few notes about why the team at YouTube added a banner that asked users to switch from IE6 to a more modern browser back in 2009:

The bittersweet consequence of YouTube’s incredible growth is that so many stories will be lost underneath all of the layers of new paint. This is why I wanted to tell the story of how, ten years ago, a small team of web developers conspired to kill IE6 from inside YouTube

Cassie Evans showcases some really nifty web design ideas and explores using the API provided by the company her team over at Clearleft recently hired to cover their building's roof with solar panels. Cassie outlines her journey designing a webpage that uses the API to populate some light data visualizations about the energy the building uses now that the solar panels are installed.

Here at Clearleft we’ve been taking small steps to reduce our environmental impact. In December 2018 we

Ben Frain just made some notes about the switch from Gulp to Parcel, a relatively new "web application bundler" which, from a quick look at things, is similar to webpack but without all the hassle of setting things up. One of the things I’ve always disliked about webpack is that you kinda have to teach it what CSS, HTML and JS are before making whatever modifications you want to those files. However, Parcel does a lot of the asset … Read article

Ivan Akulov has collected a whole bunch of information and know-how on making things load a bit more quickly with preload and prefetch. That's great in and of itself, but he also points to something new to me – the as attribute:

<link rel="preload" href="/style.css" as="style" />

Supposedly, this helps browsers prioritize when to download assets and which assets to load.

My favorite part of this post is Ivan’s quick summary at the end which clearly defines what all … Read article