20 Ideas for Better Charts

Applications we design are becoming increasingly data-driven. The need for quality data visualization is high as ever. Confusing and misleading graphics are all around us, but we can change this by following these simple rules. I found these tips very snackable and on-point. Don’t entirely agree with “4. Use adaptive y-axis scale for line charts”, …

HTTP/3 From A To Z

Over at Smashing Magazine, Robin Marx has written a 3-part series on HTTP/3: After almost five years in development, the new HTTP/3 protocol is nearing its final form. Earlier iterations were already available as an experimental feature, but you can expect the availability and use of HTTP/3 proper to ramp up over in 2021. So …

Designing Beautiful Shadows in CSS

Adding shadows on the web isn’t that hard: slap a CSS box-shadow onto an element and you’re done. But as Josh W. Comeau points out, making a good, life-like, shadow is hard. When I look around the web, though, it’s clear that most shadows aren’t as rich as they could be. The web is covered …

Motion One — WAAPI Powered Animation Library

A new animation library, built on the Web Animations API for the smallest filesize and the fastest performance. import { animate } from “motion” const boxes = document.querySelectorAll(".box"); animate(boxes, { backgroundColor: "red" }); Motion One → Be sure to also read the “Improvements over WAAPI” page.

“Learn Alpine.js“ Free Video Course

Over at Codecourse you can follow a free video course covering the aforementioned Alpine.js. Alpine.js is a refreshingly minimal JavaScript framework that gives you the reactive nature of Vue and React, but with much more simplicity. This course will get you up to speed on how to use it, with plenty of practical examples along …

CSS Circle Focus Effect

Very rad demo by Adam Argyle, which gives you a Spotlight / Focus effect upon pressing the Option/Alt key. Also works on Mobile. (Focus the CodePen embed first) See the Pen Radial focus effect with mask-image by Adam Argyle (@argyleink) on CodePen. It basically is a fixed grey overlay with a mask-image on top that …

perfect-freehand — Draw perfect pressure-sensitive freehand lines

What a wonderful package by Steve Ruiz: Draw perfect pressure-sensitive freehand lines The results are stunning imo. In the recording above you can see me write hello using the trackpad on my Mac. Yep, that’s without a stylus! Embedded below you can find a Vanilla JS demo, inspired upon the code from the React code …

CSS Grid: Overlapping grid-template-areas

When working with CSS Grid, I’m a huge fan of using Grid Template Areas. In this short video Kevin Powell builds a small layout where certain elements overlap inside a grid container. I was very glad to see Kevin also go for grid-template-areas here, showing exactly why I like using them: the ability to reshuffle …