Responsive sticky footer woes and fixes

Over the years, I must have used about a dozen different approaches to coding up a sticky footer, with varying degrees of success. I recently stumbled upon an elegant CSS3 solution and immediately put it to work on the theme on this site. But then I discovered some problems. Here’s how I fixed them.

What’s a sticky footer?

Alright, let’s say you’ve got a design that involves a big, chunky footer like the one on this site. If you have a page or a post that’s light on content, maybe just a few lines (like my contact page) and your site visitor happens to have a tall browser window, you don’t want that big footer hanging out in the middle of the screen. You want it down at the bottom of the browser window.

yes-no

That is the art of coding a sticky footer. Continue reading →

Eight tips for improving responsive typography

Don’t underestimate the importance of well-done typography in making a website appear more professional, polished, and just plain nicer. But in the world of responsive design, we need to have a few extra tricks up our sleeve for accomplishing gorgeous web type. Here are eight things you can do to improve typography in your responsive designs: Continue reading →

Animate text over images on hover without JavaScript

A couple of months ago, I published a tutorial showing how to show text over images on hover without using JavaScript. When I presented to an HTML5 Meetup Group a couple of weeks ago, I took that idea and ran with it, adding some extra special animations, and I’ll show you how to do it too. Here’s what we’ll be creating:

There are three animations happening simultaneously when you move your mouse over each image:

  1. A zoom effect on the image itself, created by scaling the image up 140%
  2. The text and its transparent black background fading in
  3. The text dropping in from the top

You’re free to use all of the animations or to remove 1 or 2 of them – it all depends on how you’d like your final product to look. Let’s take a look at how to accomplish this. Continue reading →

Place text over images on hover without JavaScript

Thanks to CSS3 and better and better browser support for it, we can accomplish things now with CSS that previously required fancy JavaScript work. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through fading in text over an image on hover. Continue reading →