Articles Tagged canvas

As a UI designer, I’m constantly reminded of the value of knowing how to code. I pride myself on thinking of the developers on my team while designing user interfaces. But sometimes, I step on a technical landmine.

A few years ago, as the design director of wsj.com, I was helping to re-design the Wall Street Journal’s podcast directory. One of the designers on the project was working on the podcast player, and I came upon Megaphone’s embedded player.… Read article

SVG and canvas are both technologies that can draw stuff in web browsers, so they are worth comparing and understanding when one is more suitable than the other. Even a light understanding of them makes the choice of choosing one over the other pretty clear.

• A little flat-color icon? That's clearly SVG territory.
• An interactive console-like game? That's clearly canvas territory.

I know we didn't cover why yet, but I hope that will become clear as we dig into it.… Read article

It’s the first thing your eyes look for when you’re switching tabs.

That’s one way of explaining what a favicon is. The tab area is a much more precious screen real-estate than what most assume. If done right, besides being a label with icon, it can be the perfect billboard to represent what’s in or what’s happening on a web page.… Read article

David DeSandro has loads of super cool JavaScript libraries he's created over the years. His latest is Zdog, a "round, flat, designer-friendly pseudo-3D engine for canvas & SVG." It's only been about a month since he dropped it (although, like any good library, it's been simmering) and it has been pretty incredible to watch it capture the imagination of loads of designers and developers. … Read article

I was recently a guest editor for an issue of Bizarro Devs. It's a great newsletter! Go sign up! I put in a bunch of links around blobs. Like those weird squishy random shapes that are so "in" right now. Here are those links as well. I'm always a fan of publishing stuff I write ;)… Read article

Space is vast. Space is awesome. Space is difficult to understand — or so people tend to think. But in this tutorial I am going to show you that this is not the case. Quite the contrary; the laws that govern the motion of the stars, planets, asteroids and even entire galaxies are incredibly simple. You could argue that if our Universe was created by a developer, she sure was concerned about writing clean code that would be easy to … Read article

Let’s take a look at how to make web pages more visually capable by combining the freedom of <canvas></canvas> with HTML elements. Specifically, we will be creating a basic HTML-to-particle effect, but the same technique could be used for many kinds of effects.… Read article

The CSS Paint API is extremely exciting, not only for what it is, but what it represents, which is the beginning of a very exciting time for CSS. Let’s go over what it is, why we have it and how to start using it.… Read article

Almost every time a new meme pops up in my Twitter feed, I think of a witty version to create. I'm not alone in this. Memes are often a way to acknowledge a shared experience or idea. In a variation of the "Is this a pigeon" meme that has been making the rounds online, a designer Daryl Ginn joked about the elementary nature of most applications that say they use artificial intelligence.… Read article

Modern browsers support playing video via the <video></video> element. Most browsers also have access to webcams via the MediaDevices.getUserMedia() API. But even with those two things combined, we can’t really access and manipulate those pixels directly.

Fortunately, browsers have a Canvas API that allows us to draw graphics using JavaScript. We can actually draw images to the <canvas></canvas> from the video itself, which gives us the ability to manipulate and play with those pixels.

Everything you learn here about how … Read article