You’ve been coding for a while now and know your way around a CSS file. You’re certainly no master, but with enough fiddling you can get where you want to go. You’re wondering though if you’ll ever get past that point where CSS is such a struggle. Will you ever be able to bust out …

What do floats really do anyway? How do they affect the box model of the elements involved? How do floated elements differ from inline elements? What are the specific rules governing the position of floated elements? How does the clear property work and what is it for? Floats can trip up even experienced developers and …

We’ve decided to reward our faithful fans with an exclusive treat. Anyone that “likes” Design Shack on Facebook can download a free, in-depth CSS tutorial! To follow up last week’s article on the difference between absolute and relative positioning, this week we’re taking a look at an extremely basic question with an incredibly broad reaching …

Responsive design has brought about a whole new list of challenges for web designers who have decided to take the plunge and leave static design behind. Creating a layout that works well at not one but several, or even all, possible widths requires patience, creativity and of course, lots of testing. Nothing replaces checking out …

Today we’re going to embark on the challenge of creating an animated banner of photos that automatically scrolls horizontally through an infinite loop. The best part: we’re going to do it without a single line of JavaScript. To make this banner truly useful, our goal will be to use individual photos dropped into our HTML, …

Responsive web design requires a very different way of thinking about layout that is both challenging and exciting. The art of layout was already complex enough for the centuries that it was defined by fixed elements, now things are becoming exponentially more complicated as layouts become increasingly adaptive. To help reprogram your brain to consider …

On my laundry list of todo items that I’ll do “someday” is the idea of creating a prebuilt library of useful CSS animations. The bad news is that I’ll likely never actually get around to doing this. The good news is that developer Dan Eden beat me to it. Today we’re going to check out …

Preprocessors like Sass are helping us flex our development muscles in nearly every area of our CSS. Variables, mixins, inheritance and many more great features make coding easier and more concise than ever. So what about leveraging Sass for responsive design, or more specifically, for media queries? Are there any features of Sass that pair …

Navigation menus used to be a fairly simple thing. Code up an unordered list, float it left and you’re good to go. With responsive design being all the rage these days though you’re faced with some new challenges when creating a menu design. Follow along as we start from scratch and code a simple but …

Historically, most web designers and their clients have approached the desktop side of any project first, while leaving the mobile part as a secondary goal that gets accomplished later. Even with the rise of responsive design, many of us begin with the “full size” site and work our way down. There’s a growing trend in …

Today we’re going to see if we can take a single image inserted via HTML and make it look like a messy stack of images using only CSS. The key: pseudo elements. Along the way we’ll see how embarking on a project like this can quickly lead to some messy code and how we can …

I love finding free tools that are capable of making my job (and yours) just a little bit easier. The web developer community is positively overflowing with talented people who are more than willing to share their creations with the world while asking nothing in return. Today we’re going to look at one such tool …

We’ve been using floats for layout pretty much since we left tables behind. It’s a quirky solution that can often cause troubles, but if you know what you’re doing, it works. One interesting alternative to floats that people are turning to more and more lately is to set the display value of an element to …

I was recently discussing the merits and various features of CSS preprocessors with a colleague. We covered all of the basics: how it’s great to have variables and how mixins can save you an incredible amount of coding time. When the conversation turned to some of the more obscure features though things got interesting. When …

Responsive design isn’t a fad that arose because of a cool CSS technique, it’s an answer to a problem. Always remember that and constantly ask yourself whether or not you’re really adequately addressing that problem. If you’re using copy and paste to insert your media query breakpoints, your solution might be flawed. Let’s discuss why …