I’ve started using LESS a few months ago on a few projects. LESS allows you to extend the way you write CSS, letting you use variables, nested selectors, operations and mixins. It sounds great — and it is great — but there are a few things that can make it work against you. These are some of my thoughts on LESS.
Author archive
Books: “HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions”
The second book I’m reviewing is “HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions”, by web standardistas Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson.
The little known font-size-adjust CSS3 property
Ever wanted to use fallback fonts on your CSS with different aspect ratios without them looking huge (or tiny)? The sparkling new CSS3 font-size-adjust property could do just that, maybe.
A quick note about the :empty pseudo-class
I’m in love with the simplicity that CSS3 selectors can bring to our stylesheets. Here’s a brief explanation of one of my favourites: the :empty pseudo-class.
Do designers need a personal style?
A post by Darren Hoyt caught my eye the other day (among the hundreds of unread posts on my RSS reader…) where he asked whether designers needed a personal style or not. I wrote up a quick comment at the time, but I feel the question deserves a little more discussion — specially because no-one seems to have a definite answer (my bet is that there isn’t one).
Clients aren’t stupid
The first time I came across the Clients From Hell website I laughed and sympathised with the poor designers that had sent those quotes in. I’m not laughing now though.
WordPress: flexible pages lists with the extended page list plugin
WordPress is quite versatile and easy to use, but it seems to fail in some features that should be present at its core, like the ability to list pages’ content easier. Here’s an explanation of how to use a little plugin I found recently, and that doesn’t seem to be that widely known or documented.
The CSS3 :target pseudo-class and CSS animations
It’s no secret that I’m always looking for an easy way out using CSS instead of trying to replicate things with convoluted code — there are so many underused techniques that we could be applying to our designs as an enhancement layer! In this experience, I take a brief look into the :target pseudo-class and a very simple CSS animation.
The tangibility of websites, or something like that
Last night I watched Objectified, a good film about the design of everyday things. In the film, the matter of durability and sustainability in design is mentioned a lot, and that led me to think of how those ideas translate to web design.
Remembering: the CSS3 multi-column layout module
Because I will not shut up about CSS3, this time I’ve decided to show you a little bit of the multi-column layout module. This module allows you to layout the content of an element in multiple columns, like flowing text on a newspaper-type layout.