In this third instalment of Inspired Design Decisions, Andy Clarke will teach you how to use frameworks to create layouts as engaging as in the well-known Ernest Journal. All it takes is an understanding of layout design and imagination. Curiosity keeps a creative mind open to new possibilities, and that’s what Ernest Journal magazine — the inspiration for this issue — is all about. Ernest Journal’s design is successful because although each article has its own distinctive elements which connect the visual style with the content, those articles use a consistent grid system and foundation styles.
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The support of multiple writing modes is key to the way that our new layout methods of Flexbox and Grid Layout have been designed. An understanding of CSS Writing Modes is useful if you want to work with vertical scripts, or change writing mode for creative reasons. However, they also underpin our new layout methods, and those ideas are increasingly being applied across all of CSS. In this article, find out why Rachel Andrew believes understanding writing modes is so important.
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Margins in CSS seem simple enough at first glance. Applied to an element it forms a space around the element, pushing other elements away. However, in this article, Rachel Andrew will take a look at some of the things which trip people up with regard to using margins. In particular, you will be looking at how margins interact with each other, and how margin collapsing actually works. As with anything in CSS, share with your team the decisions you make, and comment your code!
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In this second installment of Inspired Design Decisions, Andy Clarke will teach you how to expand your repertoire of layouts by combining more than one grid into a compound grid. This article will change the way you think about designing with grids.
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You may not have thought much about lists, although we use them frequently in our markup. Many things can be marked up quite logically as a list. There is more to styling lists in CSS than you might think. In this article, Rachel Andrew starts by looking at lists in CSS, and moving onto some interesting features defined in the CSS Lists specification — markers and counters.
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In this second part of our tutorial on building Sketch plugins, Matt Curtis will pick up where he left off with the building of our user interface, and then he’ll move on to the key feature of actually generating our layer mosaics and optimizing the final plugin code. You will learn how to connect the user interface to the core plugin code and how to implement the plugin’s main features. Last but not least, you’ll also learn how to optimize the code and the way the plugin works.
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In this two-part article, you’ll learn how to build your our own Sketch plugins from scratch — giving you the skills needed to accomplish tasks much faster, easier, and better.
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In this article, Miriam Suzanne takes a deeper dive into the ‘CSS Custom Properties for Cascading Variables’ specification to ask, “Why are they called custom properties, how do they work in the cascade, and what else can we do with them?” Pushing past the “variable” metaphor, custom properties can provide new ways to balance context and isolation in CSS patterns and components.
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There is a wide variety of choices when it comes to creating a PDF from a web application. In this article, Rachel Andrew takes a look at the tools that are available and shares her recommendations to help you find the tool that works best for you. She’ll explore ways in which we can generate a PDF directly from a web application on the fly. It isn’t a comprehensive list of tools, but instead Rachel is aiming to demonstrate the different approaches. If you have a favorite tool or any experiences of your own to share, please add them to the comments below.
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Creating complex SVG animations can be a challenging and tedious task — but not anymore. In this article, Mikołaj Dobrucki will show you how to create path animations for the web using SVGator, an online app created especially for the purpose of animating SVG files. It is a web-based app that allows you to import static SVG files, animate them using a user-friendly visual interface, and export them as animated SVG. Exported animations are CSS-based and ready to use on the web.
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