Kirby Kosmos

Originally published via email on Mai 4, 2018.

There is so much interesting stuff going on in our industry: with browsers supporting more features seemingly on a daily basis, with the possibilities CSS opens up for designers (and the crazy stuff people do with it), with helpful tools for all sorts of problems, and a lot more.

Kirby in the Wild

Frank Schätzing
Author/Book Website

Kirby Enhanced

Robert Katzki shares a Kirbytag for embedding PDF files into your website (free).

Always test third party plugins thoroughly before using them in production!

CSS I

If you are planning to use CSS grid in in an upcoming project, check out CSSGr.id, an interactive tool for generating quick boilerplates for common layout problems as a basis to expand upon.

Fonts

Variable fonts promise more flexibility regarding font attributes such as width, slant, x-height, slabs or rounding, facilitating responsive design on the typography layer. Examples of what you can do with variable fonts can be found here and here. Browser support is unfortunately still somewhat limited.

JS

Micro.js is a collection of small JavaScript frameworks and libraries that solve a single problem.

CSS II

GridToFlex is a new open source project by Una Kravets. It provides flexbox fallbacks for CSS grid layouts. Participation welcome.
Osvaldas Valutis wrote an article about how to implement the "priority navigation pattern" using progressive enhancement to reduce the amount of JavaScript needed to the min.

Forms

Mary Lou shares an interesting idea for a progressive hover effect on desktop, for example to highlight errors in a form when the user approaches the submit button.

This & That

Heleen van Nues and Lennart Overkamp discuss the downsides of using wireframes and how "priority guides" can help focus on the user and content.

Dear Data is a beautiful project by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec. Each week – over the period of a year – they sent each other postcards with visualizations of data related to their daily lives. Now available as a book.

Dave Rupert shares a compendium of tech-related laws, entitled the Eponymous Laws of Tech.
How HTTPS Works and How DNS Works are two nicely made explanatory tutorials in the form of a comic.
Anton Lovchikov shares how to adjust elements within components to make them look optically aligned.
Rachel Andrews wrote a Guide To The State Of Print Stylesheets in 2018, or how we can make pages of our websites printer friendly, for example for printing recipes, invoices etc.
And here's some music for when you get back to coding again…