CSS

Unraveling the mystery of percentage-based heights in CSS

One of the most perplexing and befuddling things in CSS for me, for many years, was the behaviour of percentage-based heights. Sometimes, seemingly at random, setting “height: 100%” would have no effect at all. When I finally figured out what was going on, it was like a puzzle piece snapping into place; everything made so much more sense! In this post, I’ll share the epiphany I had, and we’ll explore some solutions.

Container queries expand the universe of designs that can be implemented, giving us whole new superpowers. Now that container queries are broadly available, I think it’s time we start exploring this potential! In this post, I’ll share the “killer pattern” I can’t stop using in my work, and explore what’s possible with this new capability.

Glassy headers have become a core part of the “slick startup” UI toolkit, but they’re all missing that final 10% that really makes it shine. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create the most realistic lush frosted glass anywhere on the internet.

Lots of exciting new features have been landing in CSS recently, and it can be tough trying to figure out if they’re safe to use or not. We might know that a feature is available for 92% of users, but is that sufficient? Where do we draw the line? In this blog post, I’ll share the framework I use for deciding whether or not to use a modern CSS feature

It’s been a couple of years since container queries started landing in browsers… so why isn’t anyone using them? It turns out that container queries are kinda tricky; they’re not as straightforward as media queries. In this tutorial, we’ll break it all down and make sense of them, so that you can start using them in your work.

Of all the latest and greatest CSS features, the “:has” pseudo-class wasn’t exactly at the top of my wishlist. Once I started using it, however, I kept discovering incredible things I could do with it. It’s now become a core part of my toolkit! In this blog post, I'll show you some practical real-world problems I solved using “:has”, as well as some wild experiments that blew my mind!

The Ultimate Guide to Centering in CSS

Back in the day, centering an element was one of the trickiest things in CSS. As the language has evolved, we’ve been given lots of new tools we can use… But how do we pick the best option? When do we use Flexbox, or CSS Grid, or something else? Let's dig into it.

CSS Grid is an incredibly powerful tool for building layouts on the web, but like all powerful tools, there's a significant learning curve. In this tutorial, we'll build a mental model for how CSS Grid works and how we can use it effectively. I'll share the biggest 💡 lightbulb moments I've had in my own learning journey.

CSS gives us so many options when it comes to expressing color—we can use hex codes, rgb, hsl, and more. Which option should we choose? This turns out to be a surprisingly important decision! In this article, we'll take a tour of color formats in CSS, and see which option will serve us best.

When we truly learn the secrets of the Flexbox layout mode, we can build absolutely incredible things. Fluid layouts that stretch and shrink without arbitrary breakpoints. In this action-packed interactive tutorial, we'll pop the hood on the Flexbox algorithm and learn how to do remarkable things with it. ✨

“Should I use pixels or rems?”. In this comprehensive blog post, we'll answer this question once and for all. You'll learn about the accessibility implications, and how to determine the best unit to use in any scenario.

As developers, it can be tempting to grab a pre-styled UI framework like Material UI or Bootstrap. Seems like a great way to outsource design and save a bunch of time, right? In my experience, this is an unrealistic expectation, and things don’t quite work out that way.

The mental model shift that makes CSS more intuitive

As front-end developers, we often learn CSS by focusing on individual properties. Instead, we should focus on how the language uses those properties to calculate layouts. In this blog post, we'll pop the hood on CSS and see how the language is structured, and how to learn it effectively.

Have you ever noticed that gradients tend to look a little gray and washed-out in the middle? This happens because of a mathematical quirk with RGB colors. Fortunately, we can work around this quirk, and create beautiful, lush, saturated gradients.

I have a set of baseline CSS styles that come with me from project to project. In the past, I'd use a typical CSS reset, but times have changed, and I believe I have a better set of global styles!

In order to create lush, realistic shadows in CSS, we need to use multiple layers and colors. How do we come up with all of the parameters, though? I've built a tool that'll help.

When I look around the web, most of the shadows I see are fuzzy grey boxes. It doesn't have to be this way, though! CSS gives us the tools to create rich, lush, lifelike shadows. In this tutorial, I'll show you how.

The “transform” property is such a powerful part of the CSS language! In this blog post, we'll take a deep look at this property and see some of the nifty things it can do.

I know so many super-talented developers who share the same achilles heel: CSS. Instead of trying to “outrun” CSS, this article explores why leaning in and going deeper can be a tremendous boon for your development life and your career.

Exploring stacking contexts, one of the most misunderstood mechanisms in CSS.

The z-index property can be a tricky little bugger. Sometimes, no matter how much you crank up the number, the element never rises to the top! In this article, we explore stacking contexts, and see how they can thwart our efforts to use z-index. We'll also learn how to use this mechanism to our advantage.

My personal suite of “best practices”

styled-components is a wonderfully powerful styling library for React, and over the years I've learned a lot about how to use it effectively. This article shares my personal “best practices”.

“Margin collapse” has a dastardly reputation, one of the trickier parts of CSS. Fortunately, it gets a lot easier once you learn a few rules! In this tutorial, we take a deep dive into the governing principles, and learn how to use them to our advantage.

Is it possible to create an implementation of a design that matches to-the-pixel? Well, not really, but that shouldn't discourage us! In this article, I'll show how I became designers' best friend by leveraging a series of tricks to get my implementation looking near-pixel-perfect.

An elegant solution to a tricky modern layout

Certain layouts are surprisingly dastardly. On the modern web, one of the most common layouts is also one of the trickiest. In this tutorial, I break down how to build the "full-bleed" layout using CSS Grid.

CSS variables are *really* cool, and they're incredibly powerful when it comes to React! This tutorial shows how we can use them with React to create dynamic themes. We'll see how to get the most out of CSS-in-JS tools like styled-components, and how our mental frame around media queries has been wrong all along.

Styling an ordered list can be surprisingly tricky; there's no way to get at that bullet! In this tutorial, we'll see a handy trick using CSS counters that lets us style ordered lists without breaking proper semantics.