Sass

According to an article from A List Apart about CSS Grid, a "new era in digital design is dawning right now." With Flexbox and Grid, we have the ability to create layouts that used to be extremely difficult to implement, if not impossible. There's an entirely new system available for creating layouts, especially with Grid. However, as with most web technologies, browser support is always something of an issue. Let's look at how we can make the fundamental aspects of Grid work across the browsers that support it, including older versions of Internet Explorer that supported an older and slightly different version of Grid.

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Staggered animation, also known as "follow through" or "overlapping action" is one of the twelve Disney principles of animation as defined by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas in their 1981 book "The Illusion of Life". At its core, the concept deals with animating objects in delayed succession to produce fluid motion.

The technique doesn't only apply to cute character animations though. The Motion design aspect of a digital interface has significant implications on UX, user perception and "feel". (more…)

Last fall, our dev team wanted to get started with style guides. We had added a new member to the team, and as he was getting up to speed, we realized how lacking our project documentation was. If you've ever been a new developer on a team with weak documentation, you know how confusing it can be to try to familiarize yourself with a dozen projects without documentation.

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Say you have a gradient in CSS that goes from red to transparent. Easy, right? Like this:

.element {
  background: linear-gradient(
    to bottom,
    red, 
    transparent
  );
}

There is a pretty big gotcha here, though.

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If you've ever watched old sci-fi flicks, you know how powerful loops can be. Feed your robot nemesis an infinite loop, and kaboom. Robo dust.

Preprocessor loops will not cause dramatic explosions in space (I hope), but they are useful for writing DRY CSS. While everyone is talking about pattern libraries and modular design, most of the focus has been on CSS selectors. No matter what acronym drives your selectors (BEM, OOCSS, SMACSS, ETC), loops can help keep your patterns more readable and maintainable, baking them directly into your code.

We'll take a look at what loops can do, and how to use them in the major CSS preprocessors: Sass, Less, and Stylus. Each language provides a unique syntax, but they all get the job done. There's more than one way to loop a cat.

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The following is a guest post by Filip Naumovic from Salsita Software. Filip has built a Sass tool to help with an issue I know I've experienced many times. You're happily nesting in Sass. You're maybe a level or two deep, and you need to style a variation based on some parent selector. You need to either break out of the nesting and start a new nesting context, or go nuclear with @at-root. I'll let Filip tell the story of his new tool that changes that.

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The following is a guest post by Tom Genoni. Tom is going to introduce us to the thinking and process behind Optimizely's new UI library / Sass framework. Part 2, by Daniel O'Connor, looks at some of the technical and integration bits.

When I first started working on web projects, stylesheets were seen as a necessary evil. It was neither a real language to be taken seriously by a computer-science minded engineer nor simple enough for a designer to fully own and understand. With few best practices, organization of the CSS was always ad hoc—“type styles in this section, colors in that section”—and every company did it differently. But as web applications, and the teams building them, grew larger and more complex it became harder to manage ballooning codebases while maintaining consistency across teams and projects.

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The & is an extremely useful feature in Sass (and Less). It's used when nesting. It can be a nice time-saver when you know how to use it, or a bit of a time-waster when you're struggling and could have written the same code in regular CSS.

Let's see if we can really understand it.

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