Articles Tagged SVG

I’m in love with SVG. Sure, the code can look dense and difficult at first, but you’ll see the beauty in the results when you get to know it. The bonus is that those results are in code, so it can be hooked up to a CMS. Your designers can rest easy knowing they don’t have to reproduce an effect for every article or product on your site.

Today I would like to show you how I came up … Read article “Making a Realistic Glass Effect with SVG”

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”

Flyout menus! The second you need to implement a menu that uses a hover event to display more menu items, you’re in tricky territory. For one, they should work with clicks and taps, too. Without that, you’ve broken the menu for anyone without a mouse. That doesn’t mean you can’t also use :hover. When you use a hover state to reveal more content, that means an un-hovering state needs to hide them. Therein lies the problem. … Read article “Menus with “Dynamic Hit Areas””

The first consideration is: do you really? If you can, having text next to your icons is proven over and over again to be the most accessible and clearest UX (see Apple’s latest blunder). But if you need to (and I get it, sometimes you need to), Sara Soueidan and Scott O’Hara have a pair of articles that nicely lay out all the options and present actual research on this topic.

• Sara Soueidan: Accessible Icon Buttons
• Scott O’Hara: Contextually

There are a lot of different ways to use SVG. Depending on which way, the tactic for recoloring that SVG in different states or conditions — :hover, :active, :focus, class name change, etc. — is different.

Let’s look at the ways.… Read article “Change Color of SVG on Hover”

Oh, the Many Ways to Make Triangular Breadcrumb Ribbons

Let’s have a look at how we can create a row of links that sorta run into each other with a chevron-like shape and notch on each block like you might see in a hierarchical breadcrumb navigation.

You’ve probably seen this pattern a lot. It comes up often in things like multi-step forms and site breadcrumbs. For our purposes we’re going to call these “ribbons” so we know what we’re referring … Read article “Oh, the Many Ways to Make Triangular Breadcrumb Ribbons!”

At the start of 2018, as I was starting to go a bit deeper into CSS gradient masking in order to create interesting visuals one would think are impossible otherwise with just a single element and a tiny bit of CSS, I learned about a property that had previously been completely unknown to me: mask-composite.

As this is not a widely used property, I couldn’t find any comprehensive resources on this topic. So, as I began to use … Read article “Mask Compositing: The Crash Course”