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Tips for Portable Patterns
One of the promises of design systems is portability. Every new project should benefit from the patterns and principles of the previous… why reinvent the wheel each time? But accomplishing that can be...
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A Quick Update on Our SVG Icon Process
In February of 2016, I shared what was then our SVG icon process. But as our techniques evolve with each new project, those steps feel less and less representative of what we usually do. So, here’s an...
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We’re hiring: Lead Technical Strategist
We’re looking for an experienced front-end developer to lead our growing team of developers here in Portland OR. You should have a solid understanding—and years of experience in—the building blocks of...
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Jagged Little Pill: Issues with Rounded Buttons
Even though flat, minimal interfaces have been the rage for most of the decade, purely rectangular buttons aren’t as common as you’d think. Designers like me frequently “round” the corners, dulling...
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Cooperative Design Systems
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: There once was an organization whose products lacked harmony. Its teams struggled to embrace a shared vision, continuously reinventing wheels of infinitely...
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An HTML attribute potentially worth $4.4M to Chipotle
I recently found myself racing to fill out Chipotle’s online order form before my mother could find her credit card. In the process, I discovered a bug that could cost Chipotle $4.4 million annually....
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Feeling Sassy Again
Since 2015, our team has defaulted to PostCSS as our CSS processor of choice. Overall, we like it a lot. But we’ve recently considered reintroducing Sass to our stack. Our first taste of PostCSS was...
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CSS Circles
I’m Cloud Four’s resident expert on circles. I didn’t plan to be. A while back, we worked on a project that involved a lot of circles… circular containers, circular thumbnails, circular buttons....
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Some Design Advice
As Cloud Four’s Creative Director, a big part of my job is setting direction and providing feedback for both our team and any external teams we collaborate with. A while back, I started a list of my...
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All Mixed Up: Isomorphic Sorting Gone Wrong
As a JavaScript developer, I’m used to my code running differently in different environments. But earlier this week, I ran into a problem that left me scratching my head for most of the morning. I was...
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Squashing Your Pull Requests
Photo by Yancy Min on Unsplash As a general rule, when merging a pull request from a feature branch with a messy commit history, you should squash your commits. There are exceptions, but in most...
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Rasterizing SVG Animations
The web is by far my favorite platform. I love its openness, its immediacy, its adaptability. But I still enjoy dabbling in other platforms, designing games like Spinner Galactic for iOS. A surprising...
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A Quick Update on Our SVG Icon Process
In February of 2016, I shared what was then our SVG icon process. But as our techniques evolve with each new project, those steps feel less and less representative of what we usually do. So, here’s an...
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Taking Isomorphic Apps Offline With Service Workers
For a recent project, we built an isomorphic application with Nuxt.js. It was important for our app to function for users even if they were offline, so I got to work on turning it into a PWA. But when...
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Get More For Less With Variable Fonts
I recently worked on a project where the topic of variable fonts came up when discussing typeface legibility. I had heard the term before, but I wasn’t quite sure what a variable font was. Curious, I...
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Simple Image Placeholders with SVG
We do a lot of rapid prototyping at Cloud Four, which means we’re often working with incomplete or hypothetical content. When it comes to FPO images, we’ve relied on a few different solutions:...
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Cloud Four’s Core Values
When Cloud Four was founded back in 2007, the founders set out a vision for the type of company they wanted to build. This has set the tone of the company since then, specifically as we’ve grown and...
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22 Panels That Always Work: Wally Wood’s Legendary Productivity Hack
Wally Wood was an astonishingly talented and prolific artist during the Silver Age of comic books. He got his start professionally as a teenager in the late 1940s, drawing for EC Comic’s Weird Science...
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Transitioning Hidden Elements
If you’ve ever tried to use a CSS transition on an element with the hidden attribute or display: none;, you know this can be a challenge. I’ve run into this problem a number of times and decided to...
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Staggered Animations with CSS Custom Properties
Movement in nature doesn’t happen all at once. Imagine a flock of birds taking off, raindrops splashing on the ground, or trees bending in the wind. The magic of these moments comes from many small...
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