Centering Things

By Chris Coyier on

Nikita Prokopov with a pretty humorous article about centering things in web design. This is my claim: we, as a civilization, forgot how to center things. Centering things is almost trivial in CSS at this point. There are different approaches, because there are different situations. The knowledge to do so is pretty easy to find. […]

musicForProgramming();

By Chris Coyier on

Happy Friday! I think I’m a bit unusual in that I typically like to listen to nothing as I work. Or more specifically, code or write. I love listening to music when I’m ever doing anything rote, and podcasts when I drive. But I gave musicForProgramming(); a try when I saw it the other day […]

The HTML, CSS, and SVG for a Classic Search Form

By Chris Coyier on

Let’s build a search form that looks like this: That feels like the absolute bowl-it-down-the-middle search form right now. Looks good but nothing fancy. And yet, coding it in HTML and CSS I don’t think is perfectly intuitive and makes use of a handful of decently modern and slightly lesser used features. The Label-Wrapping HTML […]

Feedback on Masonry Layout

By Chris Coyier on

Jen Simmons posted Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, aka “Masonry” layout over on the WebKit blog the other day and is actively soliciting feedback. Our hope is that web designers and developers chime in (post to social media, write blog posts) with your thoughts about which direction CSS should take. Don’t mind if I do. Do […]

Web Awesome Kickstarter

By Chris Coyier on

What is the go-to component library these days? I’m not sure there is a clear winner right now. Bootstrap is still popular I’m sure. It seems stable but also sort on maintenance mode and the fact that they are recommending this feels like they are kinda done. I imagine the Sass dependency makes it slot […]

Blocking AI Bots

By Chris Coyier on

I heard from a guy once who was incredulous I’d want to block the bots that scrape websites to train AI models. Why wouldn’t I want to help train the intelligence of the future? I get that perspective, I do, but shouldn’t it be up to me? The companies that are scraping my sites are […]

Faces.js and Playing with Densely Packed Grids

By Chris Coyier on

I only just recently saw Faces.js, a library for producing controllable cartoony avatars. It was launched in 2012, so I’m a little late to the party. It produces faces (busts, really) randomly, or with certain parameters locked to what you want. I think that’s a really cool idea, and if you needed this kind of […]

What’s Going On in Dark Theme / Light Theme Land

By Chris Coyier on

There has been a fresh round of enthusiasm and writing around light mode / dark mode support for the web lately. I think it’s driven partially by the new light-dark() function in CSS (CSS Color Module Level 5 spec) that makes it easier to declare values that change depending on the mode. Here’s the basic […]

Things That Can Break aspect-ratio in CSS

By Chris Coyier on

CSS has an aspect-ratio property, which has had full support since around 2021. It can be a very satisfying property to use, because it can help match how your brain 🧠 works or what the desired design outcome does better than forcing dimensions does. “I need a square here” or “I need to match the […]