I'm current trying out the different methods to structure web elements and text, you know baseline grids, modular scale or both combined to see what is the best. I'm currently trying out modular scale just now.
I was wondering how I would go about calculating line-height for header tags using the following scale?
http://www.modularscale.com/?16,80&px&1.618&web&table
I know the very basic idea is to pick a number from the first column as the text size and a number for the middle column for the line-height.
let's say we use 67.773px for an H1 tag, what line-height would I give that? Using 4.236em from the middle column as its line-height doesn't look great at all.
I'm probably missing something really obvious here...
Thanks.
Related
I understand that some people argue that aligning text to baseline grid isn’t necessary in web design. However, it’s intriguing to do that, and besides, the result looks slick. So, I’m pushing this forward.
Now, I have two sets of text with different font-size and line-height and I’m trying to vertically align them based on baseline grid. My questions are:
Take a look at my pictures below (“Modified” and “Oct 3, 2017”). How do you typically align them? Vertically centered based on their line-height, or align them based on their baseline? In my pictures, I took the first option. This first question is probably more about the UX, what is the “best practice” here?
Is it possible to exactly align the texts based on their baselines in CSS? What is the best and simplest way to achieve that?
I’m also adding divider lines to create a kind of list. How do you typically create them in CSS and keep them in sync with the baseline? By using border property, or else?
Attached are pictures to explain my concept. FYI, I’m a budding designer who can’t code. :p Thank you very much for your future insights.
Picture 1
Picture 2
Picture 3
I would like to know if it is possible to have line-breaking text that sometimes consists of one line and sometimes of two. I can best describe what i mean it with an image:
You would have to insert the text into separate elements which have the shape and size you want to achieve the effect you are going for. It is not possible with just one html tag.
As Watson said, you'll have to contain the elements in containers of a specific shape and size. You can't make them truly "fluid" as I think you're meaning to comment, however, you can use percentages for those containers to determine how much text is visible in space and possibly viewport sized text to try and properly fill those spaces. Definitely no manner in my mind that will allow you to easily create this in a universal method for all browsers. You're going to have a lot of ragged edges I'd suspect.
Initially I wanted to accomplish the following layout. It is just a mockup. The crux - the final layout should be in Wordpress and instead of the colored backgrounds there should be images pulled from the media library.
Basically it is a list of articles (over time they could increase or decrease in number). Therefor I was looking for an automated CSS solution covering the cases. But so far I am unable to think of a nth-child code to catch all 1/3 cases at once and another for the 2/3. Both cases are unsteady. So I came up with the idea having two nth-child cases for each box type. Is that a valid solution or is there room to improve and make things more elegant?
Best regards Ralf
Use
article:nth-child(4n+1) instead of .onethirdLeft
article:nth-child(4n+2) instead of .twothirdRight
article:nth-child(4n+3) instead of .twothirdLeft
article:nth-child(4n) instead of .onethirdRight
Example: http://codepen.io/anon/pen/tqKpz
Are there any existing plugins/extensions/methods to maintain vertical rhythm for Twitter's Bootstrap project?
It is quite a laborious task to create good vertical rhythm templates, I would rather use a pre-baked solution. I am open to creative suggestions, I just want my pages nicely aligned in the end.
Edit: To clarify what I am after...
Vertical rhythm is a technique used to ensure that every element on a page lines up according to a horizontal grid. This is achieved by setting the height, padding and margin of every item to conform to a standard unit line size. If a line of text in a paragraph is 20px high (including margin and padding) then maybe a heading 4 will also be 20px high, and a heading 1 might be 40px high. This maintains the rhythm of the text across columns.
I want to use this technique in combination with bootstrap (from twitter), but it would be quite a lot of work to get everything looking nice. For example, all the buttons would need to conform to the same vertical height definition as paragraph text etc... There are other standard controls used in bootstrap which would also all need rules to define their height appropriately.
I could start with a generic solution for vertical rhythm, which would go a long way to achieving what I want, but I wanted to know if anyone else has started this, or has any idea of another way to achieve this.
Edit: Assuming there is nothing like what I want...
Maybe just a good vertical-rhythm based css template would be a good starting point. Preferably something that is continuing to be developed, is already usable, well thought out, and adaptable.
Since no one has linked to an actual vertical rhythm boilerplate as you suggested, I took the one I use, commented it, and created a github repo for it here https://github.com/jonschlinkert/vertical-rhythm
As it says in the readme, this is a starting point for your own project.
I think what you're going after is understood. Problem is: you're looking for a grid schema in one dimension (a "vertical rhythm" set in accordance with, for example, proportional line heights...which, in a manner of speaking, measures and aligns things along a given page's Y axis)...but doing things in that manner might potentially be at odds with Bootstrap's pre-existing 12-column grid system (which, in contrast, measures and aligns things along the page's X axis). You want to "proportionalize" the height of each "row" in the framework. BUT: keep in mind, Bootstrap's design is intended to promote not just proportionality via columns solely for the sake of looking nice, but to also make pages responsive--i.e., to allow page elements to "flow" around one another vertically, and to nest fluidly. And, in that sense, issues pertaining to the height of elements measured along the Y axis may already be accounted for... I recall that most of the typographic elements in the base CSS file have proportional em sizes, and/or likewise proportional top and bottom padding, etc. Generally speaking, things are not so arbitrary that the framework screams a need for additional styling in the manner you're considering.
Even so: Bootstrap's base CSS file isn't so intolerably extensive that it'd be impossible for you to tweak the height of various element classes and IDs yourself without too much trouble. In any case, it's highly unlikely you're really going to need to do that with every styled element, right? In fact, as a framework, Bootstrap includes styling for many elements which may not even be in the app for which you're designing the front end. (EXAMPLE: Does your app have drop down menus? Great. You can style the "vertical rhythm" of drop down menus. BUT: are you also using pills or tabs in your nav bar? No pills, you say? Well, you can just delete a couple hundred lines of code in the stylesheet and save yourself the effort of having to apply your "vertical rhythm" to those unneeded elements.) Elsewise, for the elements that remain and that you do in fact need, just use a text editor to find-replace the values for line height, top and bottom padding, margins, font-size, etc...and test it out. As a CSS framework, it's pretty clear how Bootstrap is laid out; relevant elements are well sorted, and grouped together within the stylesheet's code for the most part. Once you do complete tweaking of the base CSS file, just minify your revised stylesheet...to replace the pre-existing minified version...or, perhaps, just serve it up from CloudFront if you want to optimize.
The Compass CSS Authoring Framework has explicit support for vertical rhythm based typography. For starters you can check out this short video tutorial.
Have you looked at the Square Grid CSS framework?
http://thesquaregrid.com/
A simple CSS framework for designers and developers, based on 35
equal-width columns. It aims to cut down on development time and help
you create beautiful-structured websites.
Square Grid provides a standard horizontal grid, but it also maintains a vertical grid, using a standard "square" of 28px. It is really just a grid, not a full CSS library like Bootstrap (i.e. no buttons, menus, etc).
I used to for one project and found it to be pretty intuitive, though I ultimately decided that it was too hard for me to keep track of both the vertical and horizontal grid, especially when thinking about responsive design.
You may be able to combine the two, or at least take a look at the square grid source code which is pretty simple CSS to get some ideas on how to adapt Bootstrap to meet your needs.
Is it possible to have a css newspaper-column layout arranged such a way that, any number of columns can be added and they will be continuously added to the right of the existing columns.
My thought is like this: I would just add a new div and a new column will be added to the right and so on.
If yes, how?
Here I found a 4-column newspaper layout. But column-heights are not same. I need a way so that, no matter how long the text is, they would be stipulated to a certain height.
Is it possible in CSS?
I think your needs are best served using an existing CSS framework, rather than coding it yourself from scratch, since it is really tricky business plus apallingly hard to get to work across all browsers (since some of them are not standards compliant)
Anyhow, for newspaper columns, I think there's one out there that fits the bill, 960 Grid System. It comes with 12 & 16 column "grids", with the gutters and paddings all worked out, and so long as the number of columns you intend to use is a factor of 12 or 16, it can handle it.
CSS3 provides a way of turning any HTML node's content into any number of columns. There are properties for controlling the number of columns as well as their width, relative height ("fill," or how the content is divided across the existing columns), gutter between columns, "rule" (dividing line or border), etc.
As a starting point, see the w3schools.com CSS3 Multiple Columns reference page.
However, as usual, IE alone among widely used browsers does not support the column- CSS3 properties.
One cross-browser solution is the Columnizer jQuery Plugin.
With pure CSS, it's very hard to assign several divs the same height unless that height is static. You can use ugly hacks but that will only get you so far.
For real columns, use tables, that's what they are for. Tables are valid HTML constructs, it's just that you shouldn't use them as your only layout tool. But when tables work, use tables.
you can set the height of the column using CSS, but adding a column automatically its a programming stuff using other web programming languages.