 Resources from Stephanie Eckles in 2021

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

Forms are one of the most common features of a web application. They are also a common cause of headaches. The controls you use, the markup for the structural layout, and the styling all have to be considered.

What you build can look and behave differently depending on the browser being used, and how you build it can impact the accessibility of your application.

Stephanie Eckles has prepared several lessons that work through the creation of a complete form demo featuring the most common controls with a variety of attributes.

You'll create semantic fieldsets, add responsive styles without media queries, and prepare styles for accessible validation.

The demo is built with Sass and Eleventy. Don't worry if you don't have prior experience with these tools— Stephanie's code and explanations make it easy to follow along, and additional resources are available if you need them.

Cascading Style Sheets bring order and beauty to our applications.

Accessible Cross-Browser CSS Form Styling

Techniques to improve your CSS, Sass, and HTML implementations for everyday scenarios.

HTML, CSS, and Sass

Start from a blank project and build up to an Eleventy site that includes a blog collection and is prepared to source content from a headless CMS. You'll also learn how to add Sass as the styling solution, complete with triggering 11ty to re-compile when the Sass changes.

These lessons will help explain key 11ty features and concepts to help you make the most of this amazing static site generator.

By the last lesson, you'll have learned how to:
- define custom `input` and `output` directories
- create a layout that accesses front matter variables
- watch for Sass changes and include CSS in the build proces
- create an 11ty collection using `tags`
- define front matter for an entire collection
- make and apply a filter to a collection
- generate pages from an external data source, such as a CMS or API

Eleventy was created to be a JavaScript alternative to Jekyll. It’s zero-config by default but has flexible configuration options. Eleventy works with your project’s existing directory structure.

Eleventy uses independent template engines. We don’t want to hold your content hostage. If you decide to use something else later, having your content decoupled in this way will make migration easier.

11ty

Build An Eleventy (11ty) Site From Scratch

Sass is the most mature, stable, and powerful professional grade CSS extension language in the world.

scss

Manage the color palette used in your stylesheets by creating a map of variables and a function to access the values by key. This allows you to update the colors in one location to re-theme your application and eliminate manual find and replace.

Access Theme Color Values With Sass

CSS grid is a layout model that allows defining structure in terms of columns and rows. Learn how to replace heavy 12-column grid system frameworks with the unique properties of CSS grid. By leveraging CSS grid, we can create intrinsically responsive layouts, no breakpoint media queries or lengthy list of utility classes required.

Create a Basic Responsive Grid System With CSS Grid

HTML 5 is the structure of our web pages. It is the markup that represents the DOM (document object model).

html

Learn how to ensure form text inputs are accessible by using semantic HTML. See how to use a fieldset to group related form fields together. Then, preview how proper HTML helps assistive technology like screen readers in identifying form field relationships and purpose.

Create an Accessible Group of Form Fields

Learn the fundamental difference between CSS grid and flexbox layout, and create utility classes for each `display` value. Then begin to apply and expand these concepts to style the landing page navigation.

Choose Between Grid or Flexbox for CSS Layout

Apply grid layout and see when it's necessary to break out a media query to overcome grid's lack of wrapping behavior. We'll also learn about a property that grid and flexbox share: `align-items`.

Use CSS Grid to Create Layout Columns

Grid offers us the easiest method to responsively center content. We'll use the grid property `place-content` to center the contents of `figure` to showcase our fictional product in use. Additionally, we'll learn about `object-fit` which is a modern technique that allows inline images to scale responsively within defined dimensions without distortion.

Responsively Center an Image and Caption with CSS Grid

See how to use flexbox to layout variable-width content in columns, and take advantage of `justify-content` to keep flex children center-aligned on smaller viewports. We'll also learn how `margin` can be applied to resolve for lack of a well-supported `gap` property in flexbox. At the end of the lesson, we'll have styled both the "Subscribe" section and the site footer.

Use Flexbox to Responsively Layout Variable-Width Content

We'll complete our landing page styles by using CSS grid `auto-fit` in conjunction with the grid functions `repeat` and `minmax`. The result will be a responsive column layout that wraps when content shrinks below the minimum acceptable width. We'll also see how grid and flexbox can be used together by using flexbox to align the content of grid items. Finally, we'll view the fully completed landing page and reflect on how and why grid and flexbox were each used.

Use CSS Grid auto-fit For Responsive Column Layout

The CSS property `object-fit` instructs an `img` to act as the container for its own contents. We can then use the value `cover` to have the image content behave similar to a `background-image` by scaling up or down to fit the provided dimensions. If the goal is for the image contents to remain fully visible within a container while maintaining its aspect ratio, we can use the value `scale-down`.

Apply Aspect Ratio Sizing to Images with CSS object-fit

Learn about the required and expanded syntax of CSS `box-shadow`. Then, create various kinds of effects such as shadows inside the element, a shadow that equally surrounds the element, realistic placement of the shadow, pseudo-borders, and layered effects by defining multiple shadows.

Create Basic Effects with CSS box-shadow

With just a handful of CSS properties, we can create an intrinsically responsive photo gallery using flexbox. This is accomplished by setting our preferred width as the `flex-basis` value and allowing items to both shrink and grow. The use of `object-fit: cover` on images allows them to fully fill up the list item without distortion or overflow. We finish the gallery with a small animated effect that alters `opacity`.

Create an Automatically Responsive Flexbox Gallery

Begining from a brand new project, learn how to install Eleventy (11ty), and add `develop` and `build` scripts. Next, define a custom configuration to set preferred input and output directories. Then create a home page file and your first layout while learning how 11ty handles mixing templating languages.

Create an Eleventy (11ty) Site From Scratch

Learn how to add Sass to an Eleventy (11ty) project including directing 11ty to re-compile when Sass changes are made. This step involves adding two new functions to the `.eleventy.js` configuration: `addWatchTarget()` and `addPassthroughCopy()`. Then, define the link to the compiled CSS file within an 11ty layout.

Add Sass Compiling and Watch for Changes in Eleventy (11ty)

Create a blog directory with posts for your Eleventy (11ty) project, and learn how to define the posts as an 11ty collection using `tags`. Then make a blog index page and write a `for` loop with Nunjucks to output a list of each post linked to the post page.

Define an Eleventy (11ty) Collection to Create a Blog

Filters in Eleventy (11ty) are a way to mutate data including string variables or arrays such as collections. Learn to create a filter for use on a collection which will select a random item from the collection.

Apply a Filter to an Eleventy (11ty) Collection

Eleventy (11ty) is able to run any JavaScript or Node functions at build time. This makes it possible to source external data such as from a headless CMS or other API. Learn how to generate pages from data pulled from a mock CMS using the 11ty `pagination` method and designate the data as an 11ty collection. You'll also learn how to define variables for the page using `eleventyComputed`, and then write a `for` loop to output a link to each page.

Generate Eleventy (11ty) Pages From External Data

View a preview of the form fields we'll be creating in this course, inclusive of custom CSS styles for text inputs, textareas, selects, multiselects, radio buttons, and checkboxes. Then get an overview of the base project and key parts of the Eleventy build process in regards to compiling with Dart Sass and use of Nunjucks for project template scaffolding. 

Prior experience with Eleventy or Nunjucks is not required, but you may also enjoy learning how to [create an Eleventy site from scratch](https://egghead.io/playlists/build-an-eleventy-11ty-site-from-scratch-bfd3?af=2s65ms) in less than 20 mins in my other egghead collection.

Topics

Instructors

Content Type