Bring your grid to Yoga class

I’ll have to admit that, for years, I have resisted designing with flexible (fluid) layout mostly because I didn’t want to figure out all the math to make it work properly. My other problem was that, at certain sizes, the design just seemed to fall apart. For the longest time I was unconvinced that it was worth all of the effort that it would take to get the grid working correctly and looking good.

After reading Ethan Marcotte’s article and book on responsive design, I was convinced to try it again. I thought that I could amend the grid-width function already in Bourbon to my needs by giving the variables percentage value. I was wrong. It didn’t handle sub-containers because the ratio between columns and gutters changes.

I could still use Sass to do the math ( target ÷ container = percentage ). I gave the grid-width function a makeover to accommodate this and the result is flex-grid.

Getting Started

Start off by declaring a couple variables for the function. $fg-max-columns is the total number of columns in your grid. $fg-column and $fg-gutter define the relationship between column and gutter. I use pixels here because it is what I am most accustomed to.

// 960 12 column grid
$fg-max-columns: 12;
$fg-column: 60px;
$fg-gutter: 20px;

The function takes two values: the number of columns that you want the element to span and its container column (which defaults to $fg-max-columns). This way the function allows you to nest containers without losing the relationship between column and gutter. For example:

body {
  margin: 0 auto;
  max-width: 1400px;
  width: flex-grid(12);

  section {
    float: left;
    width: flex-grid(8);  // No second value needed since it's inside the main container

    article {
      float: left;
      width: flex-grid(6, 8); // Since the article is inside the 8 column section 
    }

    aside {
      float: left;
      width: flex-grid(2, 8);
    }
  }
}

Gutters

You’ll notice the grid doesn’t have any gutters yet. They too can take two arguments, a container column count and gutter width. Container is set to your default max columns ($fg-max-columns) and gutter is set to $fg-gutter, which you’ll almost never need to change.

section {
  float: left;
  margin-right: flex-gutter();
  width: flex-grid(8);

  article {
    float: left;
    margin-right: flex-gutter();
    width: flex-grid(6, 8);
  }

  aside {
    float: left;
    width: flex-grid(2, 8);
  }
}

The last touch

I add a max-width to my main container, mostly for me because I’m usually browsing at full screen on a 30” monitor. Since the grid is totally percentage based, I usually look to where the line-length becomes too long.

body {
  margin: 0 auto;
  width: flex-grid(12);
  max-width: 1400px;
}

Controlling color with Sass color functions

Sass comes with functions that can easily be applied to colors in your CSS properties. These functions, when used correctly, can be incredibly powerful. They take some of the sting out of choosing and manipulating colors. When used with variables, they can speed up development drastically.

Let’s start off with a creating variable for the color that we’re going to manipulate:

$base-color: #AD141E;

This is important for me for two ways:

1. It will allow color changes to be much more fluid and easy
2. Since I can’t be bothered to memorize hex values for each color, it helps me remember colors, eliminating the need to reference a photoshop mock every time I need a color.

Darken & Lighten

These two adjust the Lightness of the color’s HSL values. Sass will parse our hex color variable to hsl, then make the adjustments. You call them on the color with a percentage value between 0 and 100. I usually stay in the range of 3-20%.

darken( $base-color, 10% ) 
lighten( $base-color, 10% )

Saturate, & Desaturate

These will will adjust the Saturation of the colors HSL values, much like Darken and Lighten adjusted the Lightness. Again, you need to give a percentage value to saturate and desaturate. 

saturate( $base-color, 20% ) 
desaturate( $base-color, 20% )

Adjust-hue

This adjusts the hue value of HSL the same way all of the others do. Again, it takes a percentage value for the change.

adjust-hue( $base-color, 20% )

Adding Alpha Transparency

Using our hex color we can do a few things to get it to be a little transparent. We can call hsla, rgba, opacify, and transparentize. All of them accomplish the same thing, just in different ways. I stick to rgba as it comes most naturally to me which takes a color and a value from 0 to 1 for the alpha.

rgba( $base-color, .7 )

Tint & Shade

Our very own Phil LaPier has added to those base color functions. Both of these are accessible in Bourbon. They mix your color with a value of white (tint) and black (shade) and are similar to Darken and Lighten. They take the color and a % value for the change.

tint( $base-color, 10% )
shade( $base-color, 10% )

Getting more advanced

Once you have those down and you are looking for more control you can look into some more advanced color control with adjust-color, scale-color, change-color. These are for multiple changes in one color function. You can easily lighten the color and add some transparency all in one.

Some of the best places to use these color functions are for gradients, borders and shadows. When you need a slightly darker border and a slightly lighter inset shadow just adjust a color variable and let Sass do the rest for you. Buttons provide the perfect place to test out the functions. Check out some of the functions used on the thoughtbot buttons:

border: 1px solid darken($base-color, 20%);
text-shadow: 0 -1px 0 darken($base-color, 10%);
@include box-shadow(inset 0 1px 0 lighten($base-color, 20%));

Learn more about Sass, CSS and HTML during my Advanced HTML & CSS Workshop on December 8th and 9th.

Climbing back up the mountain

Today is the end of my fourth week as a Design Apprentice here at thoughtbot and it’s been pretty crazy so far. Before I got started I was excited to start filling in all the minor gaps in my knowledge. My first week was spent looking at documentation and demos for new tools and languages and running through tutorials. It was exciting stuff, and all seemed pretty straightforward. All I had to do was jump onto a project and I’d be contributing in no time. I was confident that I could go from Photoshop jockey to front-end guru in a matter of days.

Then I started writing code that was actually intended for release to a client’s product. The panic set in pretty quickly. The “minor gaps” were quickly revealed to be “huge gaping chasms of inexperience.” I had worked with HTML and CSS plenty of times before, but the pace was leisurely, the deadlines few and far between, the complexity very low. Now I would go from discussing a new feature in the morning to the expectation of having it complete by lunch. 

This was a pretty big wake up call for me. At my previous job I was considered the design team’s authoritative source of development knowledge. Questions came to me first and my answers were accepted as absolute truth. On the rare occasion that the designers were expected to write code (the horror!) the task would be assigned to me. I was pretty comfortable on the top of my mountain, so to be body-slammed off of it so effortlessly was a serious bruise to my ego.

It’s been two more weeks since then. Things have gotten better. I’m not blazing fast, and I don’t always do things perfectly the first time, but my confidence is back (tempered with a good dose of humility). I’ve learned a few important things about tools and process during this time. If you’re an apprentice, or a designer that’s new to the expectation of delivering front-end code, hopefully this will be of some benefit to you.

Vim

Vim will look clunky to you if you come from a background similar to mine. A few years of Dreamweaver, the eventual move to a better piece of software like Coda or Espresso, and then this? You want me to work in a text-based interface with a complete lack of familiar keyboard commands? It will seem insane, but there are some huge benefits and you should stick it out. Once you start to become familiar with it, the potential for amazing speed will become apparent. The hard part is making your hands learn all the new movements and commands. Once your muscle memory starts to kick in things will become faster. I wouldn’t say I’m great with Vim yet, but I’m at least as fast as I was in Espresso, and working hard to improve.

It’s important to note that I work in an office of Vim users. It makes sense for me to use it and I have a great support and learning network. If everyone in your office uses TextMate, or Espresso, or something else, you should probably use that too so that everyone’s on the same page.

Sass

Sass is amazing. If you know anything about CSS, just reading their documentation ought to get your blood rushing. My favorite part is the ability to nest selectors, which makes it incredibly easy to target elements correctly. Add in variables and mixins and you’ve got a very powerful extension to CSS.

If you want a set of great mixins, allow me to humbly suggest thoughtbot’s Bourbon.

Ruby on Rails

This was the hardest part for me to adapt to. I’m used to working on static sites, so finding where everything was located in the Rails framework was intimidating at first. Luckily, I get to attend workshops (for free, it’s a great perk) at thoughtbot and our Intro to Ruby on Rails workshop was incredibly helpful in teaching me to navigate an application.

Code/Design Reviews

Have someone else look at your work. A lot. More experienced people will be able to point out what you’re doing wrong and what you could be doing better. It’s important to correct these behaviors before they become habits. Don’t be timid about offering your own feedback either. Design is often a collaborative process, and talking about your ideas usually results in better work.

But what if you’re the only designer at your job, or a freelancer? Start by posting your work on Twitter or Facebook and asking other designers for some feedback. I’ve found that many people are willing to take the time to send you a short review. Dribbble can be another great place to get input.

Google

You can almost always find answers to your problems by searching for them online. The odds of encountering an issue that somebody else hasn’t run into and solved before are incredibly low. And in our industry we’re lucky to have a lot of knowledgeable peers who enjoy writing about their solutions. 

You will improve

Most importantly, try to stay positive. You’ll have ups and downs, successes and failures, but as long as you’re moving forward you’ll be ok. I’m lucky to have people at thoughtbot who are committed to making me a better designer and a better front-end developer. Try to find people like that for yourself, either in your workplace or online. We’ve got a great community full of intelligent, helpful people. Take advantage of it.

Danger, Danger: High Voltage! Use Rails 3.1 for Static Sites

I’m a big fan of Jekyll, but boy do I love SCSS and CoffeeScript. I recently set out to create a static site using Rails 3.1, to take advantage of the lovely Sprockets integration. There are alternatives (like Middleman, and Octopress) but I wanted to use Rails itself instead.

Our homebrewed high_voltage gem allows for static pages, so I wanted to use that to hook up my little static site that will eventually be dynamic. Here’s the process I used.

Fire in the disco

Generate the app:

gem install bundler --pre
gem install rails --no-ri --no-rdoc
rails new danger_danger

Swap out your Gemfile with:

source 'http://rubygems.org'

gem 'rails', '3.1.1'

gem 'flutie'
gem 'high_voltage'
gem 'jquery-rails'
gem 'redcarpet'

gem 'sass-rails',   '~> 3.1.4'
gem 'coffee-rails', '~> 3.1.1'
gem 'uglifier', '>= 1.0.3'

Rebundle and let’s remove some other cruft:

bundle
rm config/database.yml public/index.html
rm -rf app/{helpers,mailers,models} test/ doc/ db/

Rails includes all of the subframeworks (ActiveRecord, ActionMailer, etc) by default. We don’t need those, so at the top of config/application.rb, you can replace require 'rails/all' with:

require 'rails'
require 'action_controller/railtie'

There’s references to ActionMailer in the various config/environments/ files…it’s best to just comment them for now since we may want it back later.

# comment out this in config/environments/development.rb
config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = false

# comment out this in config/environments/test.rb
config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :test

I want to write templates in Markdown, so we’ll need to tell Rails to handle that. Drop this into config/initializers/redcarpet.rb, thanks to this gist. Hopefully in future versions of Rails this will be easier if Tilt is integrated into ActionView.

class ActionView::Template
  class Redcarpet < Handler
    include Handlers::Compilable

    def compile template
      ::Redcarpet.new(template.source).to_html.inspect
    end
  end

  register_template_handler :md, Redcarpet
end

Let’s start with just a homepage. Change vim to your editor of choice!

mkdir app/views/pages
vim app/views/pages/home.html.md

In that file, you can write Markdown as normal:

# Welcome to the home page!

This should say something important.

In your config/routes.rb, point to it:

root :to => 'high_voltage/pages#show', :id => 'home'

Fire up your server, and you should be able to see your home page!

rails server

Awesome! You should now see your home page rendered in markdown. What’s even better is that you can include CoffeeScript and SCSS like you normally would with a Rails app. The Rails Guide on the asset pipeline is a great read for this if you haven’t seen it.

For more static pages, you just need to drop different markdown files into app/views/pages, and high_voltage will render them as normal at /pages/:yourpage, like so:

echo "Fire in the" > app/views/pages/disco.html.md
open http://localhost:3000/pages/disco

I’ve put a repo up on GitHub if you want to check out a working version of this.

Don’t you want to know how we keep starting fires?

Ok sure, this is a lot of setup for a static site. The idea is that eventually I want to be using Rails anyway, so why not just use it to start? If I end up creating another one of these, I may end up making a Rails Template, which makes the legwork of setting this kind of Rails app up way easier. For now, this works great, and I hope it helps you out too!

Getting all your ducks in a column

While redesigning the thoughtbot site, I gave myself a challenge: create an easily editable and maintainable baseline grid. I figured that there had to be an easier way to do this with Sass than with plain old CSS. 

I started off going to the wonderful modulargrid.org to create my grid. I grabbed the png and threw it into the background so I could be certain everything is aligning perfectly. Then I created 3 variables based on the grid; one for the column unit width, the gutter width and line-height. This made things conceptually easier for me instead of trying to balance numbers.

$line-height: 20px; /*line-height for the site*/
$unit: 60px; /*column size*/
$gutter: 25px; /*gutter size*/

Getting some layout

Almost as soon as I had started, Sass 3.1 came out touting functions and in the change log examples I found this gem:

@function grid-width($n) {
  @return $n * $unit + ($n - 1) * $gutter;
}

This function calculates that width of the column by giving it the number of units you want it to span. Now all I needed to do is drop in grid-width() for any width and it will conform to the column sizes in my grid. For example, I wanted the grid to be 12 units wide, so on the wrapper for the site I put:

width: grid-width(12);

Of course this isn’t always perfect, the box model adds padding and the border to the width of the box and it breaks the grid. Bah. But Sass is wonderful and can do simple math and can apply that even to functions. So on a box that spans 4 columns but has 20px of padding on both sides I can subtract the padding to get the correct width of the column.

padding: 20px;
width: grid-width(4)-(20px*2);

Dealing with the baseline

The background image that I had for the grid also gave me guidelines for where the baseline should fall. Then all vertical spacing for the design uses the line-height variable. Everything from padding to the margin to the height of the images can all be declared with the line-height variable and some multiplication. 

height: $line-height*6;
margin-top: $line-height*3;
padding: $line-height;

Again, I ran into scenarios with the box model where I didn’t want to use the whole line-height. These changes and exceptions were easy to accommodate with a little math just like the grid-width().

padding: ($line-height*2)-(1) 0; /*Account for 1px border*/

Throughout all the Sass I’ve successfully avoided doing any real calculations and feed Sass a bunch of math problems. Updating and maintaining the layout is easy, anyone who goes into the Sass won’t have to figure out what the width of a 3 columns would be. It also has the ability to be easily adaptable to having a fluid layout.

Bonus

The grid-width function has also been incorporated into Bourbon, our default set of mix-ins and functions. Use variables $gw-column and $gw-gutter and then you are all set. No need to set up the function. 

If you’d like to get some more Sass and advanced HTML & CSS tricks come to my workshop on Sept. 26th & 27th.