10 lifesaving HTML/CSS tricks for designers

Learning new things brings both joy and frustration, and development sits on the top of the frustration pyramid. Sadly, most job offers require that you both design and develop websites nowadays, so knowing how to code at least some front-end is crucial as a UX/UI designer.

Let me give you some tricks that helped me a lot while developing a couple of websites in these years.

10) The magic setup

This trick helps you prevent most of the bad-layout problems you can encounter in HTML.

Horizontal sliders, absolute-positioned items doing what they want, margins, and padding randomly everywhere: we don’t want them.

* {
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
max-width: 100%;
overflow-x: hidden;
position: relative;
display: block;
}

Then, if you need to change something, you edit it on the specific item.

sometimes “display:block” could be harmful, but in most cases, you’re going to treat <a> and <span> as blocks like others.

9) Animated lines and decorations

you can see the line when I hover text.

Often you want to create interesting effects like animated underlines, appearing and disappearing background, etc.

Don’t create a new element, just utilize ::after and ::before pseudoselectors. They work great for these things.

Do not forget to set content property: if you forget it, the pseudo-element will not be rendered.

.item::after {

content: "";
position: absolute;
top: xyz;
left: xyz;
... properties you want;
}

8) Viewport height as text size

Sometimes, you’d want to create responsive texts, adapting to the desktop fitting them.

The best way is to use viewport height. Why not the width? because if we set up small fonts based on width, going on mobile they will shrink to “none”.

Let’s see an example:

3vw on a 1920x1080 desktop = 60px. Big.

3vw on a 320x*** mobile = 9px. TOOO SMALL.

Viewport height instead, is extremely more stable between mobile and desktop.

.text {
height: XYZvh;
}

7) HTML IMG backgrounds

A typical img used as background case: cards.

Often in web design, you want to create a container that has an image background. This was often made with the background-image CSS property, but it’s extremely bad in my opinion:

1. you lose SEO.

2. you have to edit CSS every time.

3. you can’t re-use code.

Let’s use a simple img inside HTML and transform it into a dynamic background!

.background {
position: relative;
}

.background img {

width: 100%;
height: 100%;
object-fit: cover;
position: absolute;
top:0;
left:0;}

6) The overflowing text effect

Modern website animation often utilizes this kind of overflowing text, appearing from the bottom.

Here an example from my portfolio website:

Let’s see the minimal code needed.

.parent {

height: /*something similar to child's font size*/;
overflow-y: hidden;
display: block;
}

.parent .child {

animation-name: appear;
animation-duration: ...s;
}

@keyframes appear {
  from { transform: translateY(/* parent's height*/) }
  to {   transform: translateY(0)}
}

Obviously, you can use transitions too.

5) Sexy hamburger menu’s logic

Let’s suppose you don’t want to use any framework like Bootstrap, which already included the navigation.

To create the mobile hamburger menu’s logic it’s pretty easy: we need just a couple of JS lines.

<div id="hamburger" onClick="handleMenu()"> ... </div>

<div id="navigation"> ... </div>


<script>
var open = false;
function handleMenu() {

/** open the menu **/
 if (!open) {
    document.getElementById("navigation").classList.add("opened");
    open = true;
   
    
  } 
/** else close the menu **/   

else {
      document.getElementById("navigation").classList.remove("opened");
    open = false;
  }
 }
}</script>

the minimal CSS we need:

#navigation {
 display: none;
}
#navigation.opened {
display: block;
}

You can create better ideas, like using absolute positioning instead of display, and making the navigation appear from the sides. It’s up to you.

4) Splitting both HTML and CSS

This is more a “workflow” kind of trick. I suggest creating different CSS files (for example, one for desktop and one for mobile) while developing, and only, in the end, merge them.

The same principle can be made with HTML. If you’re not developing in SPA environments like Gatsby, you can use PHP to include and require pieces of HTML code.

For example, you’d want to keep a “/modules” folder, containing the navigation bar, the footer, etc in separate files. So, if you need to make one change, you don’t have to edit it on every single page.

3) Smooth-scrolling

Often, modern and aesthetic websites copycat the mobile buttery scrolling on desktop too.

I am pretty sure you’ve looked for “smooth scrolling” various times, just by ending on standard CSS lines for smoothing on link anchors…but never the mouse scrolling.

The reason stays in the word “smooth”. Developers like to call the “smooth-scrolling” as “momentum scrolling” or “Inertial scrolling”… so that’s the right keyword.

But the problem isn’t just finding the right script niche. You should also find the script that works with your development techniques and, often, pre-made websites.

Here’s Lorenzo helping you:

easy-scroll.js is an MIT license script that works pretty everywhere and pretty well. Now it’s pretty hard to find it on the web, so I link you the drive to it.

The second one, luxy.js, is a golden standard for momentum scrolling and parallax effects, but it’s heavier and sometimes a bit slow.

The third option I recommend is Locomotive, which you can find here.

https://github.com/locomotivemtl/locomotive-scroll

2) Use a CSS preprocessor

Less, Sass, SCSS. Choose the one you like the most. A lot of experienced developers will tell you that Less is the worst, but it’s often enough. But learn to use them immediately.

They will help you declare colors, sizes, etc one single time, and create CSS with for cycles and similar things. Also, it’s a mandatory skill in any developer’s portfolio.

1) Start with Gatsby.js in the first place

If there’s one thing I hate in education, is that teachers always teach things from a “vanilla” point of view.

For example, if they teach you JAVA coding, they’ll make you open ECLIPSE and run simple and “useless” code to teach you the basics.

I think that this is a great loss of time for people, since I am sure you can teach with a job-oriented framework even to beginners.

In this case, I recommend starting with Gatsby in the first place. You’ll have to code HTML and CSS anyways, but at the same time, you’ll grasp the basics of React.

This allows you to experiment a lot more and accessing complex animation libraries like Framer-Motion.

Since Framer-Motion in Gatsby is a bit different, I strongly recommend following this tutorial.

BONUS: go the hardcore way with SSR

If you want to learn the hardcore way, you can learn React or Vue in SSR. What is SSR? Server-Side-Rendering.

Since Gatsby has limitations, you probably would want to exploit the full potential of these libraries.

SSR development is harder and has a steeper learning curve, but if you’re still a beginner, you could give this a chance. If you master it immediately, well you're the GOAT. But be prepared to surf into StackOverflow.

Source: Medium - by Lorenzo Doremi

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