Grid Systems & Vue Invaders!
I love when conferences give me the opportunity to travel around the world. I love it even more when conferences go beyond the web to find inspiration from other fields. Beyond Tellerand (Düsseldorf, Germany) was the best possible combination.
Amazing talk by Miriam Suzanne at the Beyond Tellerand conference about the benefits of using plain CSS instead of heavy library for your grid! Very useful and inspiring. Thanks!
Right from the start, Beyond Tellerand was unlike other conferences. Rather than hearing familiar talks about familiar technology, the first day took us on a journey through web annotations, intricate illustrations, design for non-designers, robots with personality, stop-motion tinkering, and programatically-generated art.
I spoke on day two, followed by “bleeding edge” accessibility, large-scale projection-mapping, the women who built the internet, and a lesson on ethics in tech. How could I even begin to match the inspirational scope of these other presenters, while talking about layout?
I couldn’t – but I did have some fun. Inspired by the generated art from Jared Tarbell and the Levitated Toy Factory, I picked one of his art pieces to recreate with CSS variables (aka custom properties) and CSS grid layouts.
I spent that evening studying his image, and translating it into HTML
and CSS. My first draft relied heavily on :nth-child() selectors,
leading to an absurd 3MB CSS file. By adding custom properties in the
HTML, I was able to streamline things dramatically. This second draft
relies on HAML to generate the required HTML for a static (but
responsive) result.
That went over well at the conference, but I decided to improve it after the conference was over. By moving the component logic into Vue, I could interact with the controls dynamically – and animate the changes: shuffling, resizing, and more. Finally, I pulled in an Asteroids-inspired browser snippet so you can destroy your creation. Enjoy the invasion!
See the Pen Vue Invaders! by Miriam Suzanne (@miriamsuzanne) on CodePen.
I highly recommend watching the other talks. Here are a few of my favorites:
Display color gamut ranges and more
OddContrast, OddBird’s color format converter and contrast checker, gets new features – including the ability to swap background and foreground colors, and display color gamut ranges on the color sliders. Contrast ratios now incorporate foreground color alpha values.
Start using author-defined functions
There’s been a lot of progress in the CSS Working Group lately, but I want to draw your attention to a prototype that landed in Chromium ‘Canary’ (v136+) browsers with the experimental platform features flag enabled. Author-defined Functions are coming to CSS, and you can start to experiment with them…
There are several proposals, but one major road block
We’re trying to make progress on shorthand syntax for CSS logical properties. But the path forward depends on where we hope to be a decade from now.