Category: Design

Things related to design

An Event Apart Seattle 2018

I’m back from the An Event Apart Conference which is really awesome – if you work in or around the web, you should go sometime. A great mix of speakers, great range of topics, and how cool is it to have dinner with Eric Meyer? This is the guy behind the famous CSS reference book CSS: The Definitive Guide from O’reilley (now on it’s 4th addition) and he was a major influencer in helping get browsers to adopt CSS as a standard. I also got to have breakfast with Jeffery Zeldman – a major force behind the Web Standards Project which led the way to why we even *have* web standards now. I love his gruff, honest personality and approachability. It was a blast just hanging out and learning with a bunch of my peers across the amazingly diverse web industry. I highly recommend the An Event Apart conferences. I hope to post more on some of the things I learned at this conference.

CSS Grid: Thoughts on when to use auto-fill

Sara Soueiden has an excellent CSS-Tricks post on Auto-Sizing Columns in CSS Grid: `auto-fill` vs `auto-fit` where she covers the difference between the two. At the end she asks the question of what the design case would be to use auto-fill as, generally, auto-fit seems to be a better solution. Thinking on it, I came up with one design situation where it actually would make sense to use `auto-fill.` As I commented on Sarah’s post:

auto-fill may make sense when building a layout template for dynamic content that is pulled in asynchronously and therefore may not appear in the view all at the same time. So basically when you have dynamic content getting loaded in and you don’t want your grid layout to “shift around” as this content comes in.

For most design situations, auto-fit is a better catch-all solution. But in cases where dynamic content is being loaded into your template asynchronously and where it’s important not for the grid layout to “shift” during this time while the content is being loaded in, auto-fill may be the better solution.