Colors can sometimes get out of hand in a project. We often start with a few well-chosen brand colors, but over time, we may find ourselves adding variations as our project grows. Perhaps we realize that we need to adjust the lightness of a button color for accessibility reasons, or that we need a slightly different variant of a component. How do we ensure that the colors we choose fit within the design system for our project?
Read it on MDN
I was just collating all the articles I’ve read over the past month in order to post them here when, coincidentally, Matthias Ott’s latest Own Your Web newsletter lands in my inbox! This month it’s all about bookmarks: how you collate them, where you keep them, and how you share them. I definitely need a better way to organise mine, which is why I’m sharing them here.
Read more
A post from Remy on Mastodon recently got me thinking:
Read more
Since I redesigned this website last year, an issue with the heading font has been bugging me. I’d noticed that, unlike in other browsers, in Safari on iOS the headings rendered poorly, slightly blurry, as if they’d been faux-bolded. Googling the problem was coming up with nothing, but I’m using a variable font, so I figured perhaps that had something to do with it not being a super-common issue.
Read more
The Green Web Foundation has recently redesigned their green web hosting directory. Previously the directory was a useful resource for finding hosting platforms that at least claim some sustainable credentials but, as I’ve noted before the information provided by each web host was somewhat limited. From the directory alone it was impossible to discern which providers could claim to be running on renewable energy rather than buying carbon offsets, for instance, or which providers were doing the bare minimum of box-ticking, as opposed to making sustainability a key part of their offering. Finding a truly green web host is hard!
Read more
This blog uses static site generator Eleventy (or 11ty. I have no idea which one is the “official” spelling, and the docs appear to delight in switching gratuitously between the two! Let’s go with “Eleventy” for now.) under the hood. I like Eleventy because it allows me to write blog posts in markdown and use Nunjucks for templates, which get built into HTML file on deployment and served as static files, so it’s nice and lightweight on the client side. I also have an Eleventy starter project that’s been long-overdue for some maintenance. I recently made a few updates, so I thought I’d note them down here.
Read more
I’ve held off publishing a “year in review” post until now because, to be honest, towards the end of last year I wasn’t feeling too optimistic about the state of the web. Normally I like to end the year with a (mostly) upbeat reflection on my experiences, and on new developments in CSS. But for the first time, I feel a sense of trepidation for my chosen profession, and the industry as a whole. It seems every week the headlines are filled with new ways that companies are using AI to exploit workers and fill the web with soulless marketing soup. Additionally, I’ve seen several friends and acquaintances laid off this year, and I have a feeling that trend might continue a while yet. It’s taken a bit of the shine of my enthusiasm for the web, even to the point of questioning whether my chosen profession is still where I want to be.
Read more
Just before Christmas I spoke at Smashing Meets Goes Green an online event focused on digital sustainability. The video of my talk is now online, so if you’d like to know more about this vast topic, jump right in!
Read more
A question I’ve been asking myself recently is “What is the purpose of this blog”? When I started writing in 2018 it didn’t occur to me that I’d still be doing it five years later. I picked the name “CSS { In Real Life }” because I loved CSS (I still do!), and that was what I was most interested in learning and writing about. But over the course of the years I’ve found myself expanding my writing into different areas: web sustainability, JS, dev ops, front-end in general, and work/life more broadly.
Read more
Last week I had the privilege of attending an online workshop on Data Visualisation Fundamentals hosted by data visualisation expert Andy Kirk. The six-hour workshop was split across two days, and consisted of a mixture of teaching materials, examples and interactive exercises (both individually and in small groups). It can be tricky to find the right balance to hold people’s attention for an online workshop — speaking from my own experience, I find I sometimes struggle to stay engaged compared to attending in person. But the blend of content here, combined with Andy’s presentation style and his expertise and enthusiasm for the subject meant that in this case I felt fully immersed. It appeared the rest of the audience was similarly engaged too.
Read more
Rachel Andrew shared a snippet of good news for CSS layout on her blog the other day: it’ll soon be possible to vertically centre an element inside a parent without the parent needing to be a flex or grid container, using the align-content property.
Read more
Melinda Seckington has just launched a brand new blog series, Beyond the Spotlight, where she’ll be talking to conference speakers about their talk process, preparation and delivery. Melinda is an accomplished speaker , writer and engineering manager, so I was honoured to be the first speaker interviewed.
Read more