Post pobrano z: Re: Pleasing Color Palettes

There are so many tools out there to help you pick colors. I totally get it! It’s hard! When colors are done well, it’s like magic. It adds a level of polish to a design that can really set it apart.

Let’s look at some, then talk about this idea some more.

Here’s one I just saw called Color Koala:

It spits out five colors at ya and you’re off to the races.

Hue will give you some too.

There’s a billion more, and they vary in approach and features, of course. Here’s a handful:

• http://color.farm/
• https://coolors.co/
• https://color.adobe.com/
• http://clrs.cc/
• https://www.colourlovers.com/
• https://flatuicolors.com/
• https://colordrop.io/
• http://www.0to255.com/
• http://materialcolors.com/
• https://material.io/collections/color/
• https://www.materialpalette.com/
• https://colorhunt.co/
• https://www.palettable.io/
• https://www.webdesignrankings.com/resources/lolcolors/
• https://hihayk.github.io/wheel/
• https://htmlcolorcodes.com/
• https://www.vanschneider.com/colors

Then there are tools that focus on gradients, like UI Gradients, Web Gradients, and Shapy.

Oh! And a site that helps with text color while keeping accessibility in mind.

There are even native apps like Sip, ColorSnapper, and Frank DeLoupe that help you select colors and sometimes keep your palettes right within them.

Colors can be programatically generated.

There is no native JavaScript API for it, but it’s still basically a one-liner:

See the Pen Generate New Random Hex Color with JavaScript by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Pleasing colors can be as well.

Generating random colors won’t guarantee pleasing palettes, especially if a bunch of random colors are paired together. PleaseJS can help build color schemes that work together. You provide it a base color and other options (like what type of color scheme) and it spits out colors for you.

See the Pen Generate Pleasing Colors by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Similarly, randomColor.js…

gen­er­ates at­trac­tive col­ors by de­fault. More specif­i­cally, ran­dom­Color pro­duces bright col­ors with a rea­son­ably high sat­u­ra­tion. This makes ran­dom­Color par­tic­u­larly use­ful for data vi­su­al­iza­tions and gen­er­a­tive art.

It doesn’t claim to make multiple colors part of a cohesive theme aside from passing in a base hue or luminosity.

See the Pen Generate Pleasing Colors by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

But the thing about just being handed colors is…

…they don’t exactly tell you how to use them. Steve Schoger makes a point of this, rather hilariously in a blog post. This is a perfectly lovely color palette:

But if you just pick those colors and plop them onto a design, you could end up with something like this:

You might like that, but you’d be in the minority. It’s not a refined design that gets out of the way and would be nice to use every day. Color usage is a bit more complicated than plopping five nice colors into a design. It’s variations on those and using them in tasteful ways, like this:

Picking up Steve Schoger and Adam Wathan’s book surely has some advice for you there!

The post Re: Pleasing Color Palettes appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Post pobrano z: Re: Pleasing Color Palettes

There are so many tools out there to help you pick colors. I totally get it! It’s hard! When colors are done well, it’s like magic. It adds a level of polish to a design that can really set it apart.

Let’s look at some, then talk about this idea some more.

Here’s one I just saw called Color Koala:

It spits out five colors at ya and you’re off to the races.

Hue will give you some too.

There’s a billion more, and they vary in approach and features, of course. Here’s a handful:

• http://color.farm/
• https://coolors.co/
• https://color.adobe.com/
• http://clrs.cc/
• https://www.colourlovers.com/
• https://flatuicolors.com/
• https://colordrop.io/
• http://www.0to255.com/
• http://materialcolors.com/
• https://material.io/collections/color/
• https://www.materialpalette.com/
• https://colorhunt.co/
• https://www.palettable.io/
• https://www.webdesignrankings.com/resources/lolcolors/
• https://hihayk.github.io/wheel/
• https://htmlcolorcodes.com/
• https://www.vanschneider.com/colors

Then there are tools that focus on gradients, like UI Gradients, Web Gradients, and Shapy.

Oh! And a site that helps with text color while keeping accessibility in mind.

There are even native apps like Sip, ColorSnapper, and Frank DeLoupe that help you select colors and sometimes keep your palettes right within them.

Colors can be programatically generated.

There is no native JavaScript API for it, but it’s still basically a one-liner:

See the Pen Generate New Random Hex Color with JavaScript by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Pleasing colors can be as well.

Generating random colors won’t guarantee pleasing palettes, especially if a bunch of random colors are paired together. PleaseJS can help build color schemes that work together. You provide it a base color and other options (like what type of color scheme) and it spits out colors for you.

See the Pen Generate Pleasing Colors by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Similarly, randomColor.js…

gen­er­ates at­trac­tive col­ors by de­fault. More specif­i­cally, ran­dom­Color pro­duces bright col­ors with a rea­son­ably high sat­u­ra­tion. This makes ran­dom­Color par­tic­u­larly use­ful for data vi­su­al­iza­tions and gen­er­a­tive art.

It doesn’t claim to make multiple colors part of a cohesive theme aside from passing in a base hue or luminosity.

See the Pen Generate Pleasing Colors by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

But the thing about just being handed colors is…

…they don’t exactly tell you how to use them. Steve Schoger makes a point of this, rather hilariously in a blog post. This is a perfectly lovely color palette:

But if you just pick those colors and plop them onto a design, you could end up with something like this:

You might like that, but you’d be in the minority. It’s not a refined design that gets out of the way and would be nice to use every day. Color usage is a bit more complicated than plopping five nice colors into a design. It’s variations on those and using them in tasteful ways, like this:

Picking up Steve Schoger and Adam Wathan’s book surely has some advice for you there!

The post Re: Pleasing Color Palettes appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Post pobrano z: Piecing Together Approaches for a CSS Masonry Layout

Masonry layout, on the web, is when items of an uneven size are laid out such that there aren’t uneven gaps. I would guess the term was coined (or at least popularized) for the web by David DeSandro because of his popular Masonry JavaScript library, which has been around since 2010.

JavaScript library. Nothing against JavaScript, but it’s understandable we might not want to lean on it for doing layout. Is there anything we can do in CSS directly these days? Sorta.

Is vertical order with ragged bottoms OK?

If it is, then CSS columns will do just fine.

See the Pen Masonry with Columns by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Flexbox can do vertical columns with ragged endings too

But it’s not quite as clever, because you’ll need to set a height of some kind to get it to wrap the columns. You’ll also have to be explicit about widths rather than having it decide columns for you.

But it’s doable and it does auto space the gaps if there is room.

See the Pen Masonry with Flexbox by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Do you need a clean bottom edge? A Flexbox/JavaScript combo can help.

Jamie Perkins originally wrote this, then Janosh Riebesell re-wrote it and, now I’m porting it here.

It totally messes with the order and requires the children to be flexy about their height, but it does the trick:

See the Pen Masonry with Flexbox + JS by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Is horizontal line masonry OK?

If it’s just the uneven brick-like look you’re after, then horizontal masonry is way easier. You could probably even float stuff if you don’t care about the ragged edge. If you wanna keep it a block… flexbox with allowed flex-grow is the ticket.

See the Pen Masonry with Flexbox + JS by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

You’d think CSS grid could help

CSS grid is very amazing and useful in a CSS developer’s everyday life, but it’s not really designed for masonry style layouts. CSS grid is about defining lines and placing things along those lines, where masonry is about letting elements end where they may, but still exerting some positional influence.

Balázs Sziklai has a nice example of auto-flowing grids that all stack together nicely, with pretty good horiziontal ordering:

See the Pen True Masonry with Grid Layout by Balázs Sziklai (@balazs_sziklai) on CodePen.

But you can see how strict the lines are. There is a way though!

Grid + JavaScript-maniplated row spans

Andy Barefoot wrote up a great guide. The trick is setting up repeating grid rows that are fairly short, letting the elements fall into the grid horizontally as they may, then adjusting their heights to match the grid with some fairly light math to calculate how many rows they should span.

See the Pen CSS Grid Masonry (Step 10) by Andy Barefoot (@andybarefoot) on CodePen.

DOM-shifted elements in a CSS columns layout

What people generally want is column-stacking (varied heights on elements), but with horizontal ordering. That last grid demo above handles it pretty well, but it’s not the only way.

Jesse Korzan tackled it with CSS columns. It needs JavaScript as well to get it done. In this case, it shifts the elements in the DOM to order them left-to-right while providing a horizontal stack using a CSS columns layout. This introduces a bit of an accessibility problem since the visual order (left-to-right) and source order (top-to-bottom) are super different & dash; though perhaps fixable with programmatic tabindex?

There’s also the original library

Float away, my pretties.

See the Pen Masonry with Masonry by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

The post Piecing Together Approaches for a CSS Masonry Layout appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Post pobrano z: Why we need CSS subgrid

I’m a huge fan of CSS Grid and I use it on pretty much every project these days. However, there’s one part of it that makes things much more complicated than they really ought to be: the lack of subgrids. And in this post on the matter, Ken Bellows explains why they’d be so gosh darn useful:

But one thing still missing from the Level 1 spec is the ability to create a subgrid, a grid-item with its own grid that aligns in one or both dimensions with the parent grid. It was originally planned to be in Level 1, but the working group decided they needed more time to work out the details, so it was removed, and it will ship in CSS Grid Layout Module Level 2, which seems to be nearing completion.

There has been a lot of discussion over the last 2 years about the use cases for subgrid, how it should be implemented, and even some debate over whether you even need it. A lot of that discussion was centered around two other approaches that can handle many of the same problems as subgrid: nested grids and display: contents

I remember one of the very first websites I worked on was much like the demo that Ken uses as an example, but this was way back in 2012 and grid didn’t exist yet. Sadly, I had to write a lot more CSS than I felt was necessary to get elements in one div to line up with elements in another. Anyway, this article kinda riffs off of Rachel Andrew’s post about subgrid and what problems it would help solve which is definitely worth checking out, too.

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