Do We Need CSS4?

Jen Simmons raised an interesting proposal for the CSS Working Group this week: Let’s Define CSS 4 It’s come up quite a few times recently…

Quick and Easy Dark Mode with CSS Custom Properties

Adding “dark mode” support to a website or app is becoming increasingly popular among developers, many of whom favour this setting…

Fun with CSS Motion Path

Animating an element along a path is something we as developers would normally reach for a big old JS library (like GSAP) for. But with the…

7 Uses for CSS Custom Properties

Custom properties (also known as CSS variables) allow us to store property values for re-use in our stylesheets. If you’re relatively new to…

Beautiful Scrolling Experiences – Without Libraries

Re-creating the ‘His Dark Materials’ Logo in CSS

I love the new BBC adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy of novels. There’s also some pretty nice graphic design to…

A Layout Trick for Building a Contact List

I recently needed to build a design for a contact list that looks like this: It consists of an email address and telephone number (with the…

A Modern Front End Workflow

Part 3: Building Our Sass Architecture

In the previous two articles we went through configuring a project starter repository using NPM scripts and Parcel. I tend to employ more or…

State of the Art CSS

Variable Font Animation with CSS and Splitting JS

A little while ago I made an animated variable font demo on Codepen. In this article I’ll explain what variable fonts are, how they can be…

Heatwave: An Animated CSS Sun Illustration

We’re right in the middle of a heatwave here in the UK, and things have been a little quiet on this blog while I’ve been very busy with…

How to Enable Experimental Web Platform Features in Chrome and Firefox

Want to experiment with the latest bleeding-edge web technologies? One way is to download a nightly (or developer) version of the browser…

Pixel Pioneers 2019 Roundup

Last week I attended Pixel Pioneers, an annual conference in my local city of Bristol. It has fast become a firm date in my calendar, and…

How to Create Better Themes with CSS Variables

A Year of Utility Classes

Last year at Mud we adopted a utility-first approach to CSS (also known as atomic CSS). Specifically we decided to use TailwindCSS, a…

Reversing an Easing Curve

Into the Matrix with SVG Filters

In this article we’ll explore how to use SVG filters for advanced colour manipulation on images. Blend modes and beyond If you’re writing…