Category: Miscellanea

CSS Animations on Top10.com

As you may be aware I work at Top10.com, and last week we officially moved the site out of beta and released a new design and some revised interactions. We decided that we wanted to make the most of the capabilities of modern browsers, and one of the main ways we did that was with CSS.

As the bulk of our audience use modern browsers we were able to use generated content, web fonts, gradients, transitions and animations to give an enhanced experience for them. You can read more about the front-end build on the Top10 blog, and although I’d be happy to talk through all of it, in this post I’m going to focus on our use of CSS animations.

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Changes and opportunities

If you’ll pardon the indulgence, I’d like to quickly discuss a few personal matters. First is that I’ve making a change professionally and moving on from my current employers, Poke London. I’ve had some great experiences working here and built some sites I’m really quite proud of – Poke’s own website not the least of them – with some of the most talented colleagues it’s ever been my privilege to work with. Poke’s record speaks for itself and I was delighted to be a small part of it for the last 10 months.

But as of Tuesday next week I’ll be working at Top10, helping the currently small team grow and develop from a start-up to an established digital brand. What most attracted me about the move from agency to product is the opportunity to be involved in evolving and shaping, to analyse and iterate; as the song has it: performance, feedback, revision. The current Top10 team are a keen and clever bunch, and I’m looking forward to working with them.

Outside of work, my book, The Book of CSS3, has been out for a few months now (and has been getting some really positive reviews), I’ve got some print and online magazine articles planned for the near future, and an outline is forming for my second book.

Later this month I’ll be one of the instructors at the forthcoming UX Bootcamp: Prototyping in Code workshop. I really enjoy helping, teaching and communicating my craft, so I’m really happy to have the opportunity to do this.

Since the beginning of the year I’ve been giving a series of talks at web development groups around London. I’m looking to do more speaking, so if you organise or take part in any local web dev groups and you’re looking for speakers, please do let me know. There’s a full list of conferences I’ve talked at on Lanyrd, and you can see video and slides of my latest talk.

I don’t think I’ve ever been busier, or more excited and nervous about what’s coming next!


Using SVG in backgrounds with PNG fallback

My last post was about using SVG values for the background-image property, and I pointed out one big problem with the technique:

The drawback of this is that it’s not ready for use just yet—browsers that don’t support SVG in background-image will not provide any fallback, even if you supply another background-image value; so in non-supporting browsers, no image at all will be displayed.

This was annoying me a little, and I couldn’t find any workarounds that didn’t use JavaScript. However, after a bit of head-scratching I’ve come up with a way to get around it.

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My Name In Print

I hope you’ll forgive a little self-promotion, as I’d just like to play a few quick notes on my own trumpet. The latest issue of Net magazine is now on sale, and features a tutorial article, Create A Dynamic Content Panel, written by me.

In the article I explain how to build a dynamic Contact area, as we did on our recent redesign of Preloaded.com, using the Web Storage API and the BBC’s Glow Javascript library.

I’m not sure what the rights situation is with this article, but I hope that at some point in the future I’ll be able to post it here on my blog. But in the meantime, you can buy a copy of Net magazine in the UK at all good newsagents, as the saying goes (I don’t know if it will be in overseas editions also).

Printed TutorialPrinted TutorialPrinted Tutorial

On the subject of print, I’m also currently writing a book about CSS3 which should be published later this year. I’ll have more information on that nearer the time.


The State of the Web 2008

Web Directions have posted the results of their 2008 survey today; full results and selected highlights are available. The most shocking result to me is that 10% of respondents still use tables for layout.


Personal notices, open practices

Today is my penultimate day in my current job; next week I’m going on a trip to Spain, and when I get back I’m starting my new job at the award-winning Preloaded agency. My focus will be shifting away from client-side development and onto information architecture; it’s a fantastic challenge for me, and I’m very excited about working on top brands for a top agency.

I’ve been slowly introducing IA into my role over the past three years, and so this is a logical step for me to take. I’ll be sad to leave my current agency, but delighted to be moving to somewhere I’ll be able to focus on what I think are the next hot topics on the web: findability & usability.

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Aside

I’ve updated my Speaking page to include more conferences, more videos, and a little on my speaking requirements and preferences. I’m planning to cut down on the number of talks I give in 2014 (twelve is too many), but am always open to interesting offers and opportunities, so please get in touch if you’re organising an event.

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