Learn Figma, Flexbox and Immutable

It's tempting to pick up a framework which has preselected flexbox or grid as the layout tool of choice, but it's important to learn when and why to use each method. This leads to slimmer stylesheets which results in better site performance, and less likelihood for "hacks" to make one method do what the other does inherently better. 

Throughout this collection, we will be progressively styling a responsive landing page template while building your knowledge on when to select grid or flexbox for any layout scenario. Spoiler alert: sometimes the best solution is using both!

The specification describes a CSS box model optimized for user interface design. In the flex layout model, the children of a flex container can be laid out in any direction, and can “flex” their sizes, either growing to fill unused space or shrinking to avoid overflowing the parent.

flexbox

Create a Landing Page with CSS Grid and Flexbox

OpenGraph images are the images you see when you paste a link into a social platform and it "unfurls" into an image, title, and description. This happens on Twitter, Discord, Slack, and many other platforms. This collection goes over everything from designing OpenGraph images in Figma, to implementing them in CodeSandbox, to returning headless browser screenshots from Netlify Functions, and finally using Cloudinary as a write-through cache. 

You will come away from this collection with the ability to ship an API that you can use on any of your sites, and also on-demand, that can generate images for not only OpenGraph unfurls, but also for Instagram, GitHub, and more. Using headless browsers with playwright to generate our images means we get full access to all the responsive power of CSS and all the logical power of JS to handle layout, importing assets like pngs, choosing different fonts, and more.

The image below is generated via the project you'll build and deploy in this course

![An example opengraph image](https://relaxed-payne-d1bfbe.netlify.com/opengraph?title=Building%20an%20OpenGraph%20image%20generation%20API%20with%20Cloudinary%20Netlify%20Functions%20and%20React&tags=figma,netlify%20functions,playwright&author=chrisbiscardi)

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

Building an OpenGraph image generation API with Cloudinary, Netlify Functions, and React

Figma is a collaborative prototyping tool that allows you to responsively design your applications, with resolution presets for all of the most popular devices. In this course, we will explore the fundamentals of Figma’s toolset that you can use for various design functions. 

We will start from scratch, then walk through scenarios you may encounter when designing a website or application. We will cover building reusable designs — known as “components” in Figma — all the way up to prototyping your designs to show screen transitions and animations between state. 

By the end of the course, you will understand the basics of Figma so you can use it to your advantage when building your next app or website.

Design, prototype, and gather feedback all in one place with Figma.

figma

The Beginner's Guide to Figma

Flexbox is a powerful way to layout HTML so that elements can grow to fit the size of their container.  It can also control how the elements are positioned within a flexed container.  

Once you start thinking in `rows` and `columns`, you can control almost any flexed layout with just a few simple flexbox layout primitives.

Get Started with Flexbox CSS Layouts

Flexbox is a wonderful tool built into the CSS specification. Using flexbox doesn't require any special framework or library, just a browser with CSS3 support. It is so awesome, and makes the arranging elements on a page almost fun!

Flexbox Fundamentals

Demystifying alignment in flexbox children

Flexbox makes it easier to create layouts that can adjust depending on the content that is added and the space available. In this lesson we look at a couple real-world applications of Flexbox in an application and website.

Using Flexbox in Websites and Applications

The flex-basis property allows us to define the dimension (along the flex-direction axis) that a flexbox child should ideally have.

Defining dimensions on flexbox children using flex-basis

Flex-basis lets us set the ideal dimensions for a flexbox child, but flex-shrink lets us define what should happen if there isn't enough room, and flex-grow can define what happens when there is too much room.

Using flex-shrink and flex-grow to make flexbox children resize correctly

Using the `order` property we alter the order in which flexbox children appear on the page, without making changes to the dom.

Using order to rearrange flexbox children

The flex shorthand makes it easier to declare flex-shrink, flex-grow, and flex-basis, but it sometimes has unexpected results because the defaults differ.

Combining the flexbox sizing properties using the flex shorthand

The Flexbox css spec allows for more adjustable layouts. The `flex-direction` property allows you to easily change the layout on the children of an element without making any changes to the dom, which is particularly useful when combined with media queries.

Using flex-direction to layout content horizontally and vertically

Adding flex-wrap to a flexbox container allows the items to form a grid. The content can then be aligned and distributed along the grid using justify-content and align-content.

Turning a flexbox into a grid using flex-wrap and align-content

Immutable.js provides many Persistent Immutable data structures including: List, Stack, Map, OrderedMap, Set, OrderedSet and Record.

immutable

There are lots of techniques for accessing data kept in your Lists. In this lesson, we will compare how data stored in collections can be accessed directly in both standard Arrays and ImmutableJS Lists. We will also look at how to find data inside an Immutable List using the `findEntry` and `findIndex` methods.

Get items in an ImmutableJS List

The reduce function in ImmutableJS allows you to transform and create new data from an existing data structure. In this example, we will do some math and calculate a sum based on data in an ImmutableJS Map.

Calculate a sum using reduce in ImmutableJS

React Native lets you build mobile apps using only JavaScript. It uses the same design as React, letting you compose a rich mobile UI from declarative components.

react-native

React Native utilizes flexbox for layout, and you can apply styles inline, or via external stylesheets. We will learn about both approaches, and create some basic styles for a native application.

For getting your application setup, you might want to checkout [this lesson](https://egghead.io/lessons/react-react-native-up-and-running?course=react-native-fundamentals&from=react-applying-styles-in-react-native)

Applying Basic Styles in React Native

The key to being productive with Immutable JS is understanding how to update values that are nested. Using `setIn` you can place a new value directly into an existing or new path. If you need access to the previous value before setting the new one, you can use `updateIn` instead. `updateIn`  accepts the same path lookups as `setIn`, but gives you a callback function instead so that you can use the previous value however you wish and return an updated version.

Updating nested values with ImmutableJS

ImmutableJS reduce functions can be nested to get data out of complex data structures. In this example, we will create an Immutable List from an Immutable Map that is nested inside of an Immutable List that is itself nested inside of an Immutable Map.

Create a list with nested reduce functions in ImmutableJS

By utilizing immutable data structures, we can write code that is easier to reason about, avoid mutation-related bugs, reduce complexity, and even gain some performance benefits along the way.

Before diving too far into Facebook's [Immutable.js](https://facebook.github.io/immutable-js/) library, let's take a moment to examine some of the pains and obstacles that mutable data structures present. 

We'll take a brief glimpse at putting the Immutable "List" data structure to work by example. We will convert our usage of Javascript's native `Array` to use [Immutable.List](https://facebook.github.io/immutable-js/docs/#/List) in order to address a mutation-related "bug" caused by multiple objects "sharing" a mutable structure (array) by reference.

Immutable.js: Introduction - Easing the Pains of Mutability

In this lesson we'll look at some of the differences between standard JavaScript Arrays and Immutable Lists. We'll create Immutable.JS Lists from scratch, as well as by converting regular Arrays. We will also compare and contrast the `push` and `concat` methods between both types of collection.

Create an immutable List using Immutable.js

In this video, you will learn how to create frames (i.e. layouts) in Figma using the "frame" tool. This will allow you to get up and running quickly using pre-defined sizes.

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