The ability to animate along a motion path is a really useful thing to have in your SVG animation toolkit. Let's explore a few ways to achieve this, including the upcoming CSS motion path module and the newly released GSAP3. From our weekly sponsor: Design every part of your website with the brand new Divi Theme Builder. Try it for free.[1] Making animations that “feel right” can be tricky. When I’m stuck, I find Disney’s 12 principles of animation[2]...
26 November 2019Last week I released my latest portfolio refresh. Like the previous two years, I wanted to create an experience that was enhanced by resizing the browser window. The 2017 version gave you a new layout every 100 pixels[1] and the 2018 version created a frame by frame animation[2]. This year I initially set out to do something with the z-axis and explore depth and forward/backward motion. I liked the idea of using layered illustration to...
As is the rule in WebGL, anything that seems like it should be simple is actually quite complicated. Drawing lines[1], debugging shaders,[2] text rendering[3]… they are all damn hard to do well in WebGL. Isn’t that weird? WebGL doesn't have a built-in function for rendering text. Although text seems like the most basic of functionalities. When it comes down to actually rendering it, things get complicated. How do you account for the immense amount of glyphs for...
I went to a JavaScript meet-up in Sydney the other night and asked the question "How many people know what CSS Architecture is?". The room was full of different people with varying backgrounds and experience. I thought at minimum around a quarter might know what I was talking about. I was hoping more would. To my surprise, only a handful of people raised their hand. I then asked, "How many people feel the difficulties they have writing...
In this week's roundup: DuckDuckGo gets smarter encryption, a fight over the sale of dot org domains, and a new browser engine is in the works. Let's get into the news! DuckDuckGo upgrades and open-sources its encryption DuckDuckGo has open-sourced its “Smarter Encryption” technology that enables upgrading from HTTP to HTTPS, and Pinterest (a popular social network) is already using it for outbound traffic — when people navigate from Pinterest to other websites — with great results: Their outbound...
We’re happy to announce that Auto Layout is now live in Figma! Buttons can resize with their text. Lists can rearrange themselves when items are moved around. And elements can be nested to create complex interfaces which respond to their content. Building Auto Layout has been a fun but long journey for us. It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a while, but it took quite a few design iterations for it to feel right. The challenge of bringing...
When you add anything with user-generated content or dynamic data to a static site, the complexity of the build process can become comparable to launching a monolithic CMS. How can we add rich content to static sites without stitching together multiple third-party services? For people in the development community static site generators are a popular choice over traditional content management systems (CMS) like WordPress. By comparison static sites are usually lightweight, highly configurable, fast, easy to use...
Another release is upon us: please welcome Firefox 71 to the stage! This time around, we have a plethora of new developer tools features. These include the web socket message inspector, console multi-line editor mode, log on events, and network panel full text search!And as if that wasn’t good enough, there are important new web platform features available, like CSS subgrid, column-span, Promise.allSettled, and the Media Session API. Read on for more details of the highlights, and...
I recently attended the ARTIFACT conference[1] in Austin, TX, and was inspired by a few talks about accessibility through the lens of site performance. It became clear to me that there is this tendency to rely on big JavaScript frameworks to handle the work — like React, Vue, and Angular — but that can be overkill in some cases. That is, negatively affecting site performance, and thus accessibility. At the same time, these frameworks can make...
It's a tool that brings attention and understanding to how color contrast can affect different people with visual impairments. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)[1] covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Just a tiny part of making the web more accessible is accommodating for those with a form of blindness or low vision. The standard grading system is a great start, but I thought I'd try to humanize the people who are...