How to Create Stunning Effects With 165 Media Queries or Less!

Responsive Web Design is the big buzz topic of the industry right now, and with little wonder; serving your site to be visually optimized for different devices and contexts is a brilliant idea. Your site exists to be seen, so why leave anyone out?

Weird RWD Side Effect

One bizarre trend emerging in this new RWD era is desktop-browsing web designers resizing their browsers to watch the break-points change the layout. The average user never sits at their desk repetitively shrinking and expanding the browser window like a mad scientist. Yup, we’re all strange. The personal website of someone like you and I likely has this kind of strange browser-resizing user as the target demographic, and most frequent visitor, so why not play to that?

Responsive Text is a relatively new sub-topic that is only just beginning to be explored (Frankie Roberto recently made this post on responsive text). Today I want to talk about changing a headline to create a striking effect using media queries. This effect is created by having many media queries that trigger in short succession. Using this approach there is no limit to the jaw dropping visuals your site can produce.

It Starts With a Personal Project

I recently refreshed my personal site ArleyM.com. There are some “old-school” responsive effects on my front page (loosely based on this responsive framework Chris Coyier tweeted about a few months back) in that the picture of me slides under my first name, but on top of my last name. This is done by having a percentage based position on the image. I figured I would be remiss to not have some other eye catching responsive feature on the site, so I dug back into my experiments. A personal project is the perfect place to do something crazy that you’ll otherwise never get the chance to do on client work. I decided to add ‘responsive adjectives’ shown at the bottom of this image:

I call the use of countless media queries “Lark Queries” (The word ‘lark‘ often refers to something done for fun, or playfully, but I also like to think of it as taking a simple concept to an extreme level). Quite simply the user will see different words based on the width of their browser. Many users will never realize that there is anything unusual going on – but when someone checks if the site is responsive, they may be surprised at this uncommon effect.

Creating the effect

There are a couple ways to achieve this. I chose to use CSS for everything. I made a media query breakpoint every 10px from 300px to 1920px, and then a
couple extra break points above that for dual-monitor, and 27″ cinema display users. I then used the CSS Content attribute to place the text in the h2. The content attribute isn’t supported by IE7, but for my site all versions of IE represent less than 4% of all traffic.

The HTML

Here we have a simple h2 with a parent div to make the selector unique (this isn’t something I want on every h2 on my site!).

The empty span is there to allow the CSS to render the content after. If I had to deal with older versions of IE I would actually put a static default word within the span, and only display it as needed using conditional wrappers (as demonstrated in How to Create an IE only stylesheet).

The CSS

@media (max-width: 980px) {
  .row h2 span:after { content: 'Unusual.' }
}

Here’s just one line of the many media queries I made (165 in total!). All that changes is the max-width value, and the content value. The media queries were the easy part, thinking of a different word and arranging in order of shortest to longest was really time consuming (Thanks thesaurus.com)!

The result is striking – the text rapidly changes with the shrinking browser. Fun! The Content element automagically adds the new word after the span with every media query breakpoint. It just feels nice to use this handy content attribute for something other than ul bullet points for once!

View Demo   Download Files

It was fun to see the differences this rarely used property has in each browser! For example, only Opera will let you select the content text, or copy / paste it.

Getting into Semantics

They say it’s a best practice to keep your content in HTML, your styles in CSS, and your behaviour in JavaScript. So am I breaking some rules by literally using a content property? I don’t think so.

You could put all of the content values in HTML and use the media queries to toggle display:none/inline, but if a screen reader or Google ever had the chance to read all of that, the result might not be what you’re after! JavaScript could do this job just fine (and with less code if you put all of the content values into an array), but my CSS demo will work even if JS is turned off. I personally find the content property charming as well, not sure why.

I would also argue that this effect does fall more into the style category than real content. It’s a bit of a gimmick, so I’m not too worried about semantics for my own project.

So What Next?

Obviously a tiny part of me would die inside every time this code with exact text was used verbatim, so how else could this massive media query technique be used? That’s where you come in! I would love to hear some ideas in the comments. Don’t let the daunting realization of how much time these would take to do hamper your imagination.

Here are a handful of other ideas I’ve thought of:

• Changing colors: The media queries could change color / background-color to shift through the color spectrum, saturation scale, or go through the tints / tones of a color (0to255.com is a good place to get some hex for this). This could happen for a small element like the color of a title, or more extreme: like a full site color scheme change.
• Faux-Animate an image:* If you could use a high quality DSLR that can rapidly take shots you could create a stunning faux animation effect (image preloading would become key, this RWD effect comes with a high bandwidth cost). There is so much potential here!
• Changing Focus: It would be amazing if changing the browser size shifted the depth-of-field focus of the images on the page!
• Go Crazy: With a little JavaScript it should be easy to tell that a browser is resizing, and no longer at the size it was on load. You can mess with those pesky browser resizing designers by having the site go insane on resize! I’m thinking Katamari Ball crazy.
• User hints: This could actually be used in a practical way to give users cues that they should rotate their phone into landscape. But ‘practical’ sounds kinda boring next to the other ideas.

As I draw to a conclusion and reflect on this list of things that can be done without being shy of media queries I can’t help but feel like we’re just looking at the tip of an iceberg. A crazy resizing iceberg.

I’m going to go practice resizing my browser in anticipation!

Update

Sass Loop implementation by Kitty.