CSS – Perpendicular Angel Design

CSS 3 For Web Designers by Dan Cederholm (also available from the publisher, A Book Apart, possibly cheaper. Support your small press publishers!)

This book actually spurred me to update my entire A Book Apart library this year. I’d read it when the original edition came out in… 2011? Something like that. And at the time it was a cutting-edge book covering all the things we hoped would be in supported in browsers sometime this decade.

So when I did a reread earlier this year, I discovered that not only were most-to-all of those things implemented, but a whole bunch of new things that Dan could only dream of in 2011 had also crossed the finish line. So, upgrade central.

The new edition covers everything through about 2016 I believe, which considering how quickly CSS is moving, means it doesn’t quite get to CSS Grid… on the other hand, A Book Apart has a book for CSS Grid now too.

Meanwhile, if you want to learn or refresh on all the goodies in CSS 3 this is an excellent place to get the not-flashy basics down, and understand what may yet be to come.

The last session of the conference was what Chris referred to as an “all-day session”. Chris spoke extensively on multiple topics throughout the day, all of which centered around the idea that writing a website today has a lot of complexity.

Truth be told, most of us in the audience know perfectly well how to build a website, at least to the point that we can build something and get it into publication. Some days it seems like everyone and a whole bunch of things (looking at you, frameworks) believe they know how to build a website.

But best practices are harder to identify and codify, especially with the industry moving on so many topics in so many directions at once. The result: this session was a fantastic use of my time, even having been in the industry for over 20 years.

It’s worth nothing that the session was very geared toward front-end development and developers. This was not the session where you were going to learn how to design a website or how to brand or even at the other end how to test. In that sense, it was the most focused session of the conference.

Since it was an all-day session, and since Chris spent a significant amount of that time actively coding, I did my best to capture the highest concepts and did not get every detail. If you’d like ever detail, Chris is teaching another session in Chicago in August.
Continue reading “An Event Apart Seattle 2017: Let’s Build a Website (and Talk About The Job of Front-End Design and Development) by Chris Coyier”