Hey there! Brian Dys here — I’m a visual and visceral person at heart. Ever since my mom lent me her old film camera, I fell in love with photography. All of my creative musings were exemplified by my second brain, the computer. This journey is a topsy-turvy ride of creative pursuits — from electronic music to UX design.
I enjoy every dull and wild moments of it — yes, this life of mine that I share with a woman named Jaycelle and a boy named Bryce. Take a peek into my kaleidoscope!
In its basic sense, HTML is standalone. It is independent from CSS especially from the perspective of screenreaders and search engine crawlers. This goes to show about the importance of semantics and content structure in the HTML markup.
In this regard, I strongly advocate for the manipulation of the style sheet instead of the manipulation of the HTML markup.
Consider the scenario wherein you, as the front-end designer, have only 3 chances in having control over the HTML markup and on the other hand, an unlimited number of revisions and updates on the visual design aspect of the project.
This indeed is a far-fetched situation – but it definitely will get us creative in setting up the HTML markup or in planning ahead. This scenario encourages us to use semantic names in the class attribute of the HTML markup as opposed to peppering it with presentational class names which are heavily tied up with the style sheet.
There are numerous types of user interfaces that we use in our designs – there are pages, screens, popovers, dialog boxes, alert boxes, sliders, tooltips, overlays, and the list goes on.
It is important for front-end designers to establish a system for naming such containers and reusing them all over our web projects via the class attribute of an HTML element (e.g., <div class="class-name">...</div>).
Say, for example, you want to define a container to appear as a dialog box. There are two important things to consider: first is the type of UI and the second is the state of that UI. The solution to this task is to hook up the class name of an HTML element with CSS. Then in CSS, the visual design for a particular UI type is already defined, as well as its different states (active or inactive).
Instead of mindlessly coming up with names, we must establish a naming convention (very similar to BEM) to help and guide us with repeatedly naming class names depending on the need.
In general, we would start from generic to specific in this syntax:
[code]<generic>__<identifier>–<specific>[/code]
The generic name says something about the whole naming convention – whether it’s a type of UI or a state of an element. The identifier is the element that narrows down towards the specific (in some cases if it answers to the generic name, it is the specific name). The specific name answers to the generic name similar to attribute="value" syntax (i.e., generic="specific").
Consider wanting to classify an element under a dialog box type of UI:
[html]
<div class="ui-type–dialog-box">
…
</div>
[/html]
Or defining a state of the dialog box:
[html]
<div class="ui-type–dialog-box ui-state__dialog-box–active">
…
</div>
[/html]
In our example, the generic names are ui-type and ui-state and the specific names are dialog-box and active, respectively. In the case of the generic name ui-type, dialog-box acts as the specific. And lastly, the separator between a generic name and an identifier is a double-underscore __ and the separator between a generic name or an identifier and a specific name is a double-dash --. The separators make the relationship between the names easier to understand and the syntax, easier to read for different front-end designers sharing front-end documents.
Hey there, welcome to Design DriveThru Blog.
This serves as our idea scratch paper – like the tissue you get a hold of in a restaurant during a light bulb moment.
The main purpose of this is to document work in progress about Front-end Design stuff. The secondary purpose is to share the thoughts with the design and development community.
I hope this gets productive and helpful.
~ Dys
I just hit a deadspot with Angular.js tutorial at Code School.
I wished that aside from the “Use a Hint” action, there’s also an available “Show the Answer” (for frustrated learners like me).
Time to skip this part!
Two of the ways in which you can show an illusion of a button being pressed are: darkening the background-color and nudging its vertical position.
[codepen_embed height=”360″ theme_id=”1820″ slug_hash=”nmEcq” default_tab=”result”]See the Pen Press Time by Brian Dys Sahagun (@BrianSahagun) on CodePen.[/codepen_embed]
It is important to provide for a hint when a user activates an element in your user interface (in this example, a button). The feedback assures the user that the element “responds” to his action.
The advantage of using transform: translateY is that it does not affect the elements around it (unlike using margin or padding).
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I remember a talk I had with Jayce during a cab ride to MRT, I was telling her about a difficulty I am having with my team about managing projects and deliverables and mostly about their productivity which is greatly dependent on my plans to develop and further each of our careers.
I realized in the process that I have my own inadequacies especially my own productivity, the way I am not focused on their individual projects because most of the time I leave them to plan their own day and I plan my own. Which resulted in a vague sense of accomplishment. What did we finish this week? Can it be improved? Should be do something better than having lots of free time?
So I resolved in resolving my management style first before taking it on other people in my team.
This week, I am being hands-on and aware that I am not micromanaging anyone. Because nobody likes even the worst or best micro-manager in the world.
