Tag: CSS drawing

Coding an Advent Calendar: Day 3

This year, I decided to create an Advent Calendar website in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. My hopes for the site are to showcase some of my frontend development abilities as well as make something fun, functional, and reusable.

Day 3

CSS bow & ribbon
I wanted to make a bow for the present entirely out of CSS, so I went back to CSS-Tricks.com’s “The Shapes of CSS” example page and found an infinity loop. I created an extra <div> for it and played around with the code a bit to get the shape right (flatter, less round, slightly more angled like it was sitting on top of the box), then changed the border colors to create a multi-colored look.

For the ribbon underneath the bow (I decided a bow alone looked a little weird), I used some similar transform: rotate() techniques from the bow and also applied different border colors to the shape to give it a similar multi-colored look like the bow.

Footer
From the beginning of this project, I knew I wanted to create some kind of horizontal, side-scrolling effect: either to display the presents in a type of slideshow, or to scroll the background as a white winter wonderland scene. I decided to add FontAwesome gift icons denoting each day leading up to Christmas in the footer that people could click on to open the present for that day.

A couple ideas for continued development:

  • Make the presents either disabled or inactive (non-clickable – error message pops up) if that day has not yet begun
  • Add small graphic hills, trees, or reindeer in the background, just above the footer (here’s some inspiration from SitePoint’s previous Christmas site)
:hover, :active, "christmas" CSS styles  
I also added some special CSS classes to help denote the current day (active), the hovered day (hover), and Christmas Day ("christmas").

References

Here are some more good resources for finding help with CSS Shapes:

  1. CSS-Tricks.com: The Shapes of CSS
  2. EnjoyCSS.com Shapes Gallery
  3. CSSPortal: Shapes
  4. CSS clip-path Maker
  5. Creating Non-Rectangular Layouts With CSS Shapes
  6. Getting Started with CSS Shapes: Wrapping content around custom paths

The last two are (extensive) blog articles that dive deep into creating non-rectangular layouts on webpages using CSS shapes.

Work Completed (to date)

  • December 3, 2016
    • CSS bow & ribbon
    • Footer with FontAwesome presents
    • Hover, active, and “Christmas Day” styles for footer presents
  • December 2, 2016
    • React.js + Axios.js initial code structure
    • Color palette
    • CSS → Sass
  • December 1, 2016
    • Let it snow
    • Typography choices
    • CSS presents (first design)
    • Design notes menu

Coding an Advent Calendar: Day 1

This year, I decided to create an Advent Calendar website in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. My hopes for the site are to showcase some of my frontend development abilities as well as make something fun, functional, and reusable (for the next year, and the next year, and the next year, etc).

Day One

The goal here is to add a little bit (1-2 hours of coding) to this each day of December leading up to Christmas (at which point it should be a completed project). I may then add some bells and whistles in the week after Christmas as well to make it more fun for New Year’s too.

The following are some initial notes (and inspirational links) I made to help guide my design decisions as I started creating this site.

Design Decisions

JavaScript plugins
I searched through a number of Codepens and sites that were using a (surprisingly wide) variety of jQuery plugins to “Let it snow” on websites. I settled on a plugin from MadeByMagnitude.com that showed snowflakes at different sizes and fell lightly over my page. Here are others:

  1. jQuery Snowfall 1.5: Small, pixel-sized snowflakes that collect on top of objects
  2. Snowstorm: Round snowflakes that “blow in the wind” as your mouse moves
  3. Round snowflakes that disburse when moused over
  4. 3D snowing effect with Three.js
Typography
The first font I selected was for the headings of the site. I wanted something that would have good thick, stylized numerals that I could use for the dates I marked on the packages. Then, I wanted looked for a body font to complement it. I thought something with rounded edges would look nice, but I found a very nice old and rounded serif font that fit the Christmas theme very nicely as well.

advent-calendar

  1. Headings: Sonsie One
  2. Body – 1st try: Varela Round
  3. Body – 2nd try: Averia Serif Libre
  4. Body – 3rd try: Quicksand
  5. Body – 4th try: Nunito

And, actually, it’s because of my time spent choosing typefaces that I decided to use this Advent Calendar design to highlight some of my favorite all-time typefaces. In a separate blog series, I’ll post One typeface per day that I’ve really enjoyed using in other designs.

CSS Shapes
I’ve recently been working with SVGs and SVG animation, but I haven’t done a whole lot with CSS shapes (i.e. using a bunch of <div> elements and strange border-radius settings to draw something interesting). Therefore, I decided to create the Christmas presents (and ribbons) in pure CSS and HTML.
day1-present

Work Completed (to date)

  • December 1, 2016
    • Let it snow (jQuery plugin)
    • Typography choices
    • CSS presents (first design)
    • Design notes menu