RWD Weekly #454

Hello again, welcome back to RWD Weekly #454, happy Friday!

I’ve had this week off my day job and it has given me a great opportunity to spend some more time tinkering around with side projects. We’ve also decided to take more advantage of this working from home and the upcoming summer by extending our patio to fit a table out the back — and I got to use a mini digger to do it. Let’s just say I’m not changing careers any time soon after removing half the side fence in the process, at least you can always roll back a failed push.

Let’s get linking.

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Article

Space Jam

Max investigates how Space Jam has changed from a performance standpoint between 1996 and 2021. While the size has got a lot bigger and the internet a lot faster, the performance times are about the same.

Roll-Your-Own vs Third-Party Design System Reference Website

Brad takes us through the pro’s and con’s of running a design system reference website. These sites are incredibly valuable in being able to get a feel for all of the design elements in their place, along with code examples at the ready.

Google Is Testing Its Controversial New Ad Targeting Tech in Millions of Browsers. Here’s What We Know

Google are looking to use Federated Learning of Cohorts (aka FLoC) to do away with Cookies but still maintain a full understanding of users and interactions with Ads. This has been rolled into 5% of Chrome users around the globe, although you won’t know if you’re one of them. Another timely reminder to user browsers like Brave & Firefox.

Words To Avoid in Educational Writing

I’m not sure why this has popped up in my feed again recently, but I’m glad it did. Chris covers off some of the words that we drop into our writing which are not helpful, or even worse, can make our readers feel bad about their skill level or capabilities.

Dynamic URL Rewriting at the edge with Cloudflare

Cloudflare will now allow you to create unique or dynamic rewrite rules for your URLs and the logic will be managed at the Cloudflare layer. If you’re using something like Netlify you might already have these defined in your .toml file, but for those that are on other hosting this can become really handy.

Tutorials

How I’ve improved my remote presentation setup

Lara takes you through her computer presentation setup, from keeping eye contact with your virtual audience to the tech that can help you keep everything running smoothly.

Creating Colorful, Smart Shadows

This very clever technique reuses the parent elements image and applies some drop shaddow and blur to get a coloured shadow effect. Nice work Kirupa!

Paper Snowflakes

A wonderful tutorial from Michelle Barker on putting together snowflakes by combining clipping and masking in CSS. She has even built a little snowflake maker in CodePen for everyone to enjoy.

Swipey image grids.

In this article, Cassie walks you through how to implement an image reveal effect for image grids. “SVG can come in handy for so much more than jazzy graphics. When you stop looking at SVG purely as a format for illustrations and icons, it’s like a lightbulb goes on and a whole world of UI styling opens up.”

Sortable Table Columns

An accessible sortable table is not necessarily the same as a usable sortable table.

Resources & Tools

UI Gradient Generator

How to Design Beautiful, Buttery-Smooth Gradients

CSS Stacking Context Inspector

Bramus provides an overview of a Chrome Dev Tools extension that allows you to understand the Z-Index stacking relationship of the page you’re viewing.

Finally

That’s all for this week. Thanks for stopping by, if you found something useful please recommend us to a friend and help us continue to grow.

Cheers,

Justin.