#449 — July 15, 2020

Web Version

Frontend Focus

The Cicada Principle, Revisited with CSS Variables — The Cicada Principle is the idea that when creating repetitive patterns, backgrounds, etc. using prime numbers can increase the appearance of organic randomness. Lea shows how she used a modern approach to this idea to format her code examples in a visually striking way.

Lea Verou

Style Stage: A Modern CSS Showcase — A modern twist on the CSS Zen Garden idea of yesteryear where people submit their own manipulations of a concept using the most modern of CSS features. Here are the submissions so far with Vaporwave being my favorite. They all have a very “90s Web design renaissance” feel to them.

Stephanie Eckles et al.

Get an Instant GraphQL API with Hasura to Build Fullstack Apps, Fast — Integrate Hasura’s GraphQL API with any frontend language or framework. Configure your backend with our intuitive UI.

Hasura sponsor

▶  What’s New in Chrome DevTools — Two of Google’s best known faces on the Chrome side of things give a twenty minute run through a whole bunch of new bits and pieces available in the DevTools in areas like performance monitoring, WebAssembly source mapping, and cookies.

Paul Lewis and Surma (Google)

⚡️ Quick bits:

💻 Jobs

Frontend Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers and work on projects for Riot Games, FOX, Sony, Coinbase, and more.

X-Team

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Vettery

ℹ️ Interested in running a job listing in Frontend Focus? There's more info here.

📙 News, Tutorials & Opinion

Memorizing Scroll Position Across Page Loads — An interesting UX enhancement that involves saving the current scroll position in localstorage before the user navigates away.

Chris Coyier / Hakim El Hattab

Responsive Suffixes in CSS Class Names with Sass — An interesting look at automating classes with Sass mixins and maps.

Philip Zastrow

A Basic Technique for Switching a Logo in Dark Mode — Logos often suit dark or light contexts and not the other, but you can swap them dynamically with a bit of CSS.

Gift Egwuenu

'13% of My Website Visitors Block Google Analytics' — It’s not just ads that get blocked but trackers too. Every site will have a different audience profile and a different likelihood of having its tracking blocked, so maybe it’s better to track requests behind the scenes or focus on other metrics instead.

Marko Saric

Adding the prefers-contrast Media Query to Firefox — This upcoming media query works in a similar way to prefers-colour-scheme, and is to be used to detect if the user has requested the system increase or decrease the amount of contrast between adjacent colors. This blog post walks through its design and implementation in Firefox.

Zeke Medley (Mozilla)

Everything You Have to Know About Core Web Vitals — Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics portraying three aspects of user experience: loading, interactivity and visual stability.

Karolina Szczur

Barebones WebGL in 75 Lines of Code — WebGL is pretty intimidating but this boils it down to the bare essentials. And if you want to go further, I still think this thorough guide is one of the best. Of course, you may see all of the boilerplate needed and just use Three.js instead, which is fine too! 😄

Avik Das

Always Bet on HTML.. Being Misunderstood

Christian Heilmann

🔧 Code, Tools and Resources

Tabler Icons: 500+ Customizable SVG Icons — Simple, monochrome, line art SVG icons covering lots of concepts from (mostly) computer and browser based concepts to arrows and weather.

Paweł Kuna

Squircley: A SVG 'Squircle' Maker — If you don’t find it hip to be square, consider a cross between the square and the circle: the squircle.

georgedoescode

Headless WordPress with Gatsby Cloud — Gatsby is an increasingly popular React-based site building framework and this new plugin brings it to WordPress. The idea is you can use WordPress as a headless CMS with Gatsby taking care of the front-end.

Hashim Warren (Gatsby)

shareon: Simple and Stylish 'Share Buttons' — They also boast good ethics as there’s no tracking code involved.

Nikita Karamov

Halfmoon: A Frontend Framework With a Built-in Dark Mode — A responsive frontend framework designed for quickly building dashboards and product pages. Uses Bootstrap-like classes, and is compatible with IE11.

Halfmoon

EmailComb: Remove Unused CSS From Email Templates — A handy online tool to try out.

Codsen ltd

A Typing / Typewriter Effect in Pure CSS — I’m quite impressed how simple this is - it leans on the steps directive to make the animation jerky enough to look like typing.

CodePen demo

🗓 Upcoming Events:

  • An Event Apart: Online Together — Human-Centered Design (July 20) — A single-day online conference with a focus on design for all users, not just some idealized average.
  • ForwardJS (July 20 - 24) — A virtual event, providing five days of workshops and talks to registrants from the comfort of their browser.
  • ViennaCalling (July 29) — An online meetup streamed on Twitch for "all who work on the web".
  • Frontcon (August 12 - 14) — A frontend conf based in Latvia that's now taking a hybrid approach, offering both online and on-site attendance options.
  • Front-End Focus (August 17) – It's got the same name as this newsletter but it's nothing to do with us. It's from the An Event Apart team though and has some fantastic speakers lined up, so it's bound to be good (just don't complain to us if you don't enjoy it! 😂)