How To Make Ordinary Extraordinary in Web Design (Part 1)

We’re used to plenty of scrolling these days, but the Glasgow International festival website has found a simple, clever way just  keeping pages short.

The Glasgow International homepage lines up its three main sections side by side and allows them to be scrolled through independently of each other.

On mobile, the same three sections form one big column. It’s a savvy solution to the mobile/desktop relationship, and a pretty stylish one as well.

The CSS behind this is suitably simple. The three sections sit inside a flex container, with all three sharing the values of overflow-y: auto; and height: 100vh; so that they always fit the desktop viewport. The really nice touch here is using scrollbar-width: auto; to remove the sidebar. Because the columns take up the whole screen you intuitively work out the way the page works as soon as you move your mouse.

One of the sites of the week on Awwwards was this portfolio website by Japanese frontend developer Kenta Toshikura. It is simply breathtaking.

The landing page’s 3D carousel on Kenta Toshikura’s homepage is so elegantly done that you almost think it possible to fall through the screen and into an alternate CSS dimension.

If in doubt, the tendency is to lean towards flat, modular arrangements, but maybe we should be thinking in three dimensions a little more often. This is a fantastic example of lateral thinking transforming what could easily have been a column of boxes into something truly memorable.

Documentation is all too often one of the first casualties of the Web’s mile-a-minute pace. It needn’t be. I have no qualms calling Stripe’s documentation beautiful.

The instructions on Stripe.com are accompanied by fully fledged code previews, with different lines highlighted depending on the section you’re reading.

I’m sure most of us have ground through enough bad documentation to appreciate the effort put into this approach. Clear, hierarchical navigation for the content, bite-sized step-by-step-copy, and of course the code snippets. Dynamic previews of code across multiple platforms and languages is above and beyond, but then why shouldn’t it be?

There are few things more valuable — and more elusive — than quality learning resources. Stripe shows there is a world of possibilities online beyond the standard words on a page.

Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/