from Natalya Shelburne
If you write code and you want to delve into design, Natalya Shelburne’s Practical Color Theory for Coders will get you up and running with a beautiful, cohesive, and accessible color palette using Sass color functions, and teach you why her palettes work so well, all at the same time.
So you write code, but design intrigues you and you’d like to delve deeper. Where to start? The sheer number of tools and tutorials is overwhelming. Later this week, I’ll be publishing an article with my recommendations for how to get started, but while you’re waiting, check out Natalya Shelburne’s [Practical Color Theory for People WhoCode][].
Natalya is a fine artist, speaker, and front-end developer. Her Sass color functions make it easy to create beautiful color palettes. Start with any HSL color – for example, your client’s primary brand color. Use Natalya’s color functions to find a complimentary color. Mix and lighten your primary and secondary colors to create neutral colors. Darken and lighten these colors even further to create black and white. Voila! You’re designing with color.
In the physical world, colors that appear next to one another experience similar lighting conditions: the bright light of morning or the dim yellow glow of a desk lamp. Using Natalya’s color functions, you can mix your primary and secondary colors to establish the same type of color relationship on the web. Check out Natalya’s demo for detailed instructions. If you’re that person who’s always asking why, she’s even provided a special toggle for you!
Have some color theories of your own? Let’s discuss. Send us a message via Twitter.
We don’t have to choose between px and rem for spacing
There are many articles and established CSS best-practices that rely on determining the correct or best units to use. Now that comparison functions are well supported in CSS, we don’t have to choose.
It’s time to stop spreading this out-dated practice
Setting the box-sizing model to border-box is one of the few remaining CSS ‘resets’ used across most projects. But there are two common approaches, and the more popular choice will cause more problems than it solves.
What do all the numbers in our clamp() do?
There are multiple tools that can help create a fluid font-size calculation for CSS – generally expressed as a clamp() function combining em (or rem) with vw (or vi) units. But the results are difficult to understand at a glance, so I wanted to visualize what’s going on…