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CSS

We’ve written 15 blog posts about CSS. View all topics »

  1. Cog 301 DP

    Autolayout

    Headshot of Mark Huot

    9/15/16

    by Mark Huot

    I’ve had a love-hate relationship with grid systems over the years. Every system I try to standardize on becomes bloated, forgotten, or yesterday’s news. I find myself constantly switching to the next best thing. What follows isn’t a proclamation that this new system is the best, or that you should drop everything and switch. Instead, allow me to walk you through my grid system evolution so that we may all learn from it.

  2. Cog 286 DP

    Happy Cog Starter Files 2016

    Headshot of Allison Wagner

    5/13/16

    by Allison Wagner

    I have spent close to 7 years as a front-end developer at Happy Cog and in that time I’ve seen our discipline go through many great changes— from spacer gifs to responsive web design, we’ve all iterated quite a bit. This rate of change is one of the things I most love about frontend— the collaborative, communicative community that pushes us all forward whether we like it or not. As process has evolved, so too has it improved.

  3. Cog 274 DP

    Expressive Type for Copy Blocks

    Headshot of Mark Huot

    2/25/16

    by Mark Huot

    How many times have you been coding a navigation and found yourself overriding the default padding on a list? Or, have you ever dove into a teeny tiny “product meta block” only to find that all your paragraphs have this ridiculous default font-size of 16px? What do you do? Well, you do one of two things… you override everything or you set more simplistic defaults.

  4. Cog illo 270 DP

    Expressive type for CSS

    Headshot of Allison Wagner

    1/28/16

    by Allison Wagner

    Guys I figured it out! I figured out how to code type on the web.

    I kid. However I have been really digging my approach to type in the template-build phase as of late. It’s super simple, saves you tons of time, makes your files smaller, and communication both with your teammates and the client more focused. I’m not selling CSS snake oil here, I’m just that into it.

  5. Hc blog v165 AS

    How to build development systems (for a web site)

    Headshot of Stephen Caver

    12/10/15

    by Stephen Caver

    Over the last year, I have been using Brad Frost & Dave Olsen’s PatternLab for many projects. In doing so, I have learned about building systems rather than web pages. Most of what I’ve learned is that I’ve been doing wrong out of habit.

  6. Cs article cognition illo jr

    Put a Pseudo-Class On It

    Headshot of Stephen Caver

    4/30/15

    by Stephen Caver

    Some days, writing plain ole everyday CSS can get a little monotonous. It’s all margins, font-families, positions and displays day-in and day-out.

  7. Hc blog Main Article Illustration v125 ss

    (Auto) Prefix All The Things

    Headshot of Stephen Caver

    10/30/14

    by Stephen Caver

    We’ve been on the Sass bandwagon here at Happy Cog for quite some time. It’s become an essential integration into our workflow. Sass’ power manifests in many ways. It makes it easier to maintain our code, it enables a modular architecture, and it helps us scale our CSS. There is a problem, though. I’m sure you all have been there.

  8. Hcw wagner

    A Simple Grid Mixin Explained

    Headshot of Allison Wagner

    11/7/13

    by Allison Wagner

    Successful design systems stand on the shoulders of sound grids. Grids form the groundwork for a uniform yet flexible suite of templates. Their layouts hold containers that fit together like pieces of a puzzle. Last week, Happy Cog, in partnership with Mijingo, released the 7th video in The Happy Cog Way series: “The Basics of Grids.” In it, MJ discusses using a nice little web app called Modular Grid Pattern, a grid generator that can export into a variety of design programs.

  9. Hcw farman

    Fall Back to the Cascade

    Headshot of Cat Farman

    10/24/13

    by Cat Farman

    When we think of responsive design, we typically focus on newfangled mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. But, as front-end developers, we still need to account for older browsers that can’t handle the newest CSS3 techniques when rendering our sites. In the case of responsive design, that means our old friend Internet Explorer 8 (and below) needs some extra handholding when we build our sites with media queries. These browsers don’t support media queries, and since they are still in widespread enough use that we can’t ignore them (~10% of users are still using IE8), we have to come up with new techniques for gracefully degrading our sites.

  10. Hcw ypc

    Dear CSS3

    Headshot of Yesenia Perez-Cruz

    10/17/13

    by Yesenia Perez-Cruz

    When Dan Cederholm introduced us that spring afternoon at An Event Apart in 2010, I took one look at you and thought, “What a dreamboat.” I knew you were going to change my life. We took things pretty slow at first—I experimented with button and gradient generators while marveling at your features. “You mean, no more cutting gradient background images? And wait, I can just round those corners however I want?!” At the time, my exploration focused on replicating classic Photoshop effects. I had no idea that that was just a small part of what you could do. Since then, you’ve brought so much adventure into my life, creating effects that I could never dream up in Photoshop.