Articles Tagged canvas

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”

The <canvas> element in HTML and Canvas API in JavaScript combine to form one of the main raster graphics and animation possibilities on the web. A common canvas use-case is programmatically generating images for websites, particularly games. That’s exactly what I’ve done in a website I built for playing Solitaire. The cards, including all their movement, is all done in canvas.

In this article, let’s look specifically at animation in canvas and techniques to make them look smoother. … Read article “Easing Animations in Canvas”

Apple is well-known for the sleek animations on their product pages. For example, as you scroll down the page products may slide into view, MacBooks fold open and iPhones spin, all while showing off the hardware, demonstrating the software and telling interactive stories of how the products are used.… Read article “Let’s Make One of Those Fancy Scrolling Animations Used on Apple Product Pages”

Sometimes, we have to go a little further than HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create the UI we need, and instead use other resources, like SVG, WebGL, canvas, and others.

For example, the most amazing effects can be created with WebGL, because it’s a JavaScript API designed to render interactive 2D and 3D graphics within any compatible web browser, allowing GPU-accelerated image processing.

That said, working with WebGL can be very complex. As such, there’s a variety of libraries that … Read article “Building an Images Gallery using PixiJS and WebGL”

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 “Making an Audio Waveform Visualizer with Vanilla JavaScript”

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 “When to Use SVG vs. When to Use Canvas”

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 “The Making of an Animated Favicon”

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 “Zdog”

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 “Blobs!”

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 “Creating Your Own Gravity and Space Simulator”