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Sometimes a cool glitchy, distorted effect is the perfect addition to your web design. Maybe you’re creating a tech site, a developer’s portfolio, or something completely experimental. Distortion effects are an unconventional but interesting way to grab visitors’ attention …

CSS Grid is one of the most powerful tools available to developers. The simple module allows you to create entire website layouts, responsive galleries, and other cool effects. With enough creativity, you can do a lot of interesting things using …

Efforts on to trace other health workers who were in contact with them

The Tamil Nadu Consumer Protection Organisation has asked the Tamil Nadu government to form a committee of officials from the environment, industries

Mel Choyce explores how the new WordPress editor (also know as Gutenberg) can be used to create more carefully art directed posts. Like gifts carefully arranged beneath the Christmas tree, it’s the contents that matters but the presentation that sells.

The New York Times release of Snowfall in 2012 took the web industry by storm. Media-rich and captivating, its design evoked wonder, fear, and desperation in the face of an avalanche. Snowfall was one of the first great art directed digital experiences in this era of the modern web (Space Jam, obviously, being one of the great experiences of the era prior).

“Art direction combines art and design to evoke a cultural and emotional reaction. …Art direction is about evoking the right emotion, it’s about creating that connection to what you’re seeing and experiencing.”

Art Direction and Design by Dan Mall

Art direction isn’t a new concept. Pick up any magazine or print publication — designers have long been creating evocative media experiences. Then the web came and messed that up. Fonts and even colors were limited at first, especially if you wanted to create something using semantic HTML rather than Flash. Early HTML and CSS didn’t offer great ways to create dynamic layouts like you’d see in a magazine. Floats, am I right?

A lot’s changed in the past decade. We have reliable ways to serve fonts, opening up vast typographic possibilities. CSS features like Flexbox and Grid allow for complex layouts. Plus, our hardware is getting better and better. We live in exciting times.

Behind the curve

But not everyone’s kept up. For most of its history, the WordPress editor was a text-first writing experience, shining with simple blogs but falling flat in the face of a complex website. Want some columns on your page? Well, there’s a plugin for that, it lets you write some pseudo-code WordPress called shortcodes, and yeah you just need to wrap your columns in this code in your editor… Or, uh, maybe you could hand-code a template for your theme that offers three columns of widget areas and put everything in there? Or maybe…

You get the point.

The new WordPress editor (codenamed “Gutenberg”) introduces the concept of blocks, like building blocks or bricks or LEGO. Rather than needing to hand-code anything, you have an interface for editing all sorts of content, even the aforementioned former nightmare of columns. Blocks can come with placeholders, so you can fill-in-the-blanks rather than having to build from scratch.

The new WordPress block editor allows me to focus on the best way of presenting my content instead of focusing on how I’m going to technically enter the content. The block editor allows my designer brain to think more creatively. I can go about creating an appropriate emotional reaction for a site’s content, rather than focusing on implementation.

Block it to me

The building blocks of the new editor (text, media) are the same, but the new ways to combine and build upon those blocks makes for a better art direction experience.

New to the WordPress editor is the Media and Text block, which combines — you guessed it — media and text into a new way to approach layouts.

This is the foundation of the new WordPress editor. Take atomic pieces, and combine them to make whole sections and layouts. Best yet, no fumbling with floats if you want to put some text next to an image!

Do you want to build a website?

Let’s imagine I’m building a website for a non-profit that rescues black cats. They offer adoption services, run a fostering program, and take in abandoned, feral, or other cats in need. The primary goal of the site is to connect people to the rescue organization. Raising awareness and soliciting donations are secondary, but still important factors.

Because so much of a person’s experience with WordPress is contingent on their particular setup — themes, plugins, and admin customizations — I’ve decided to keep this site pretty light.

The Twenty Twenty Theme

WordPress releases a new default theme pretty much every year. This year’s theme, Twenty Twenty, was built with Gutenberg in mind. It supports optional features like color schemes and wider block alignments. The design is clean and modern, and offers some additional customization options. I think it’s a good choice for this website.

Columns

While there’s no internal grid system in WordPress (yet!), the Columns block comes close to allowing complex layouts within a post or page. With it, you can start to break out of one column and think more like a print designer.

The most straightforward layout we could do is a familiar pattern on the web — three feature columns consisting of a heading, some text, and a button.

To accomplish this, I loaded up the editor and started planning.

First, I added a group block to contain my columns, and provide a background color. (The columns block does not currently support background colors, but it might in the future.)

I want my columns to stand out from the white background of the page, so I opt for a light grey.

Within the group, I placed my Column block, which features a convenient placeholder to help me pick which layout I want:

I opt for the three column option.

From here, it’s easy to build out my section — headings, paragraphs, and buttons are all existing blocks I can plop right into my columns:

It looks really good on the front-end of my site, too:

This is all fairly straightforward, but by changing up a couple columns widths and some sizing, I can get something that looks more dynamic and draws attention to the adoption process, which is the most important feature:

I could even add an image, change up my background color to match, and nest “Foster” and “Save” into another set of columns beneath “Adopt”:

All of this from the same set of blocks, yet each variation strikes a different impact. …And, you know, feels a little less like this:

But if I wanted to start looking like that, uh, second example — I can!

Media and Text

The aforementioned Media and Text block is a great building block for some eye-catching, informational parts of my homepage.

Galleries

To break up all that text content and get my site looking less like it’s for a startup, how about adding even more cute cats in between? You can never have too many cat photos on the internet.

CoBlocks is a fantastic plugin that adds new blocks to WordPress, among them the icon block I used above, as well as a couple of different gallery layouts. I think carousels are terrible when they’re used for showcasing features or content, but I think they’re a good gallery format, and having something horizontal means my cats aren’t taking up too much space (unlike my own black cat, who likes to hog all my leg room in bed).

CoBlocks comes with Carousel, Collage, Masonry, Offest, and Stacked gallery blocks. The default Gallery block in WordPress is also pretty good — much better than it used to be.

Buttons

Alright, where am I? I have my intro columns featuring the primary information about site, some informational text, lots of cute cat photos, more informational text… I think my homepage is shaping up. I just need one final element: a donation section. Can’t take care of those kitties without some cash.

The only way to integrate payments into WordPress is to either link to a third party platform, or use a plugin. I’ve used ActBlue quite a bit when making candidate websites, so I’m going to pretend that this site uses a third party service that, like ActBlue, lets me link to specific donation increments off-site.

WordPress has a Buttons block underway that lets you add a row of buttons, without needing to rely on another block like Columns, but in the meantime, CoBlocks has an equivalent block I can use for now.

Great. It’s got a bold color, and I can link to a couple different donation increments.

But it could really use… something, you know, that draws the eye even more?

Shape Divider

CoBlocks has another great block, Shape Divider, which lets you add a decorative border that sits nicely above or below any container element, like the group block I’m using here. It comes with a variety of shape styles, like hills, rounded, and pointed. I settle on waves, which includes some overlapping transparencies along the top. It’s different from the rest of my page, but in a good way — it’s a subtle way for that section to stand out.

With that final block, my homepage is almost done. I just want to touch on two more blocks that can be used to improve the design: the Separator block, and the Spacer block.

Separator

Separator inserts an <hr /> into the page, with some minimal styles to make it look nice. Themes can then add new styles, or restyle the default to get some fancy alternatives, like this:

The Separator block is a great way to break up sections in a page.

Spacer

The Spacer block is an abomination, but I love it. It’s just an empty space. Think spacer gif, but spacer div. It’s terrible, but oh, oh so useful. I can increase space between elements without having to write any custom CSS. It empowers folks that are visual, but not technical. Combine it with Columns and you can almost pretend that you’re using a grid!

(It is, at the very least, hidden from screen readers.)

Okay but what does it look like?

With those in place, let’s check out my homepage.

Almost perfect. It’s bold, streamlined, and features plenty of cute cats. The only issue that caught my eye is the gap of white between the page content and the footer, which I can fix with some CSS added into WordPress’s Customizer tool:

.home .footer-nav-widgets-wrapper {
    margin-top: 0;
}

Not too bad, considering this is the first bit of CSS I’ve had to write for my homepage layout.

How about the old editor?

Out of curiosity, I tried to recreate my homepage using the Classic Editor plugin, which restores the old WordPress editing interface. Since I used some of my favorite plugins on my block editor site, I decided it was only fair to leverage plugins on my classic site. I installed
Shortcodes Ultimate, a plugin offering over 60 shortcodes to improve the WordPress editor. It has a good shortcode picking interface, great documentation, and in my opinion, is one of the best shortcode plugins the WordPress community has to offer.

This wasn’t fun. No shortcode interface will make the experience worth it to me, when I could use Gutenberg. One misplaced bracket, and I’ve borked my site. It takes a whole lot of time. And, I almost always need to write a bunch of custom styles to get it to work with my theme.

With our homepage complete, let’s move on to some interior pages. There are a couple other blocks, and combinations of blocks, that can help me build out the rest of my site.

Cover Block

One of the earliest complex blocks offered in the new WordPress editor was the “Cover” block, which can be used for banners and hero images:

Originally, it only allowed you to add an image or video, headings, and paragraphs, but the requirements have recently been loosened so you can add whatever blocks you like. This can lead to some unique layout possibilities.

Take, for example, a “Teams” section on our About page. We could use columns to make a simple layout, like this:

But if we have better images, we could explore using Cover to create more visual impact:

Let’s say we didn’t have any staff images, or they’re all poor quality and weirdly cropped, which is… not an usual occurrence! We can forego images altogether and instead, use the new gradient picker in Cover and use that to create visual impact:

Explore third-party blocks

Like CoBlocks’s gallery blocks, many third-party WordPress plugins can enhance your site and allow you to create a better experience for your visitors.

Accordions

Let’s say this rescue organization has some FAQs. Rather than creating a wall-of-text, we could use an accordion block to organize the content for easier browsing:

Grids

If columns aren’t adequate for achieving the layout you’re looking to build, you could try the Grids plugin by Evolve, which comes with a “build your own grid” feature:

I can use this block to make a more visually interesting landing page for the “Get Involved” section, which only exists to link out to its child pages:

Typography

You can also use plugins like CoBlocks and Kioken Blocks to customize your site’s typography, opening up the possibilities for a truly from-scratch site design. And I have to admit, as someone who makes web software, the idea of giving full typographic control to users terrifies me… but as a designer, I absolutely love this feature! ????

With these tools, it won’t take long to finish my website.

Tons of new possibilities

Mix and match to create beautiful, art-directed experiences using blocks. You can look for plugins that support and build on the new editor, or specifically download individual blocks in the new WordPress block directory (just beta launched!).

Unsure of how to combine blocks to make an impact? A couple of plugins like Atomic Blocks, Kioken Blocks, and Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg include pre-curated layouts you can quickly add to your own sites. These layouts are already art directed, so you can choose the one that creates the biggest impact on your own audience.

Explore, and share your results!

About the author

Mel Choyce is a wicked awesome product designer based in Boston, Massachusetts. Not only is Mel a WordPress Core Committer and former Release Lead, she is a regular core contributor and speaks frequently at WordCamps on design, typography, and user experience.

When Mel isn’t designing products at Automattic, she enjoys cold brew coffee, craft beer, and rocking out in her band. Say hi to her on Twitter at @melchoyce, and visit her site at choycedesign.com.

More articles by Mel

Rachel Andrew guides us through a tour of the last fifteen years in CSS layout, as manifested in articles here on 24 ways. From the days when Internet Explorer 6 was de rigueur, right up to the modern age of evergreen browsers, the only thing you can be sure of is that the web never stands still for long.

I’ve written nine articles in the 15 years of 24 ways, and all but one of those articles had something to do with CSS. In this last year of the project, I thought I would take a look back at those CSS articles. It’s been an interesting journey, and by reading through my words from the last 15 years I discovered not only how much the web platform has evolved - but how my own thinking has shifted with it.

2005: CSS layout starting points

Latest web browser versions: Internet Explorer 6 (at this point 4 years old), IE5.1 Mac, Netscape 8, Firefox 1.5, Safari 2

Fifteen years ago, my contributions to 24 ways started with a piece about CSS layout. That article explored something I had been using in my own work. In 2005, most of the work I was doing was building websites from Photoshop files delivered to me by my design agency clients. I’d built up a set of robust, tried-and-tested CSS layouts to use to implement these. My starting point when approaching any project was to take a look at the static comps and figure out which layout I would use:

• Liquid, multiple column with no footer
• Liquid, multiple column with footer
• Fixed width, centred

At that point, there were still many sites being shipped with table-based layouts. We had learned how to use floats to create columns some four years earlier, however layout was still a difficult and often fragile thing. By developing patterns that I knew worked, where I had figured out any strange bugs, I saved myself a lot of time.

Of course, I wasn’t the only person thinking in this way. The two sites from which the early CSS for layout enthusiasts took most of their inspiration, had a library of patterns for CSS layout. The Noodle Incident little boxes is still online, glish.com/css is sadly only available at the Internet Archive.

This thinking was taken to a much greater extreme in 2011, when Twitter Bootstrap launched and starting with an entire framework for layout and much more became commonplace across the industry. While I understand the concern many folk have about every website ending up looking the same, back in 2005 I was a pragmatist. That has not changed. I’ve always built websites and run businesses alongside evangelizing web standards and contributing to the platform. I’m all about getting the job done, paying the bills, balancing that with trying to make things better so we don’t need to make as many compromises in the future. If that means picking from one of a number of patterns, that is often a very reasonable approach. Not everything needs to be a creative outpouring.

Today however, CSS Grid Layout and Flexbox mean that we can take a much more fluid approach to developing layouts. This enables the practical and the creative alike. The need for layout starting points - whether simple like mine, or a full framework like Bootstrap - seems to be decreasing, however in their place comes an interest in component libraries. This approach to development partly enabled by the fact that new layout makes it possible to drop a component into the middle of a layout without blowing the whole thing up.

2006: Faster Development with CSS Constants

Latest web browser versions: Internet Explorer 7, Netscape 8.1, Firefox 2, Safari 2

My article in 2006 was once again taken from the work I was doing as a developer. I’ve always been as much, if not more of a backend developer than a frontend one. In 2006, I was working in PHP on custom CMS implementations. These would also usually include the front-end work. Along with several other people in the industry I’d been experimenting with ways to use CSS “constants” as we all seemed to call them, by processing the CSS with our server-side language of choice.

The use case was mostly for development, although as a CMS developer, I could see the potential of allowing these values to be updated via the CMS. Perhaps to allow a content editor to change a color scheme.

Also in 2006, the first version of Sass was released, created by Hampton Catlin and Natalie Weizenbaum. Sass, LESS and other pre-processors began to give us a more streamlined and elegant way to achieve variables in CSS.

In 2009, the need for pre-processors purely for variables is disappearing. CSS now has Custom Properties - something I did not foresee in 2006. These “CSS Variables” are far more powerful than swapping out a value in a build process. They can be changed dynamically, based on something changing in the environment, rather than being statically set at build time.

2009: Cleaner Code with CSS3 Selectors

Latest web browser versions: Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 3

After a break from writing for 24 ways, in 2009 I wrote this piece about CSS3 Selectors, complete with jQuery fallbacks due to the fact that some of these selectors were not usable in Internet Explorer 8.

Today these useful selectors have wide browser support, we also have a large number of new selectors which are part of the Level 4 specification. The changes section of the Level 4 spec gives an excellent rundown of what has been added over the years. Browser support for these newer selectors is more inconsistent, MDN has an excellent list with the page for each selector detailing current browser support and usage examples.

2012: Giving Content Priority with CSS3 Grid Layout

Latest web browser versions: Internet Explorer 10, Firefox 17, Safari 6, Chrome 23

My 2012 piece was at the beginning of my interest in the CSS Grid Layout specification. Earlier in 2012 I had attended a workshop given by Bert Bos, in which he demonstrated some early stage CSS modules, including the CSS Grid Layout specification. I soon discovered that there would be an implementation of Grid in IE10, the new browser shipped in September of 2012 and I set about learning how to use Grid Layout. This article was based on what I had learned.

The problem of source versus visual order

As a CMS developer I immediately linked the ability to lay out items and prioritize content, to the CMS and content editors. I was keen to find ways to allow content editors to prioritize content across breakpoints, and I felt that Grid Layout might allow us to do that. As it turned out, we are still some way away from that goal. While Grid does allow us to separate visual display from source order, it can come at a cost. Non-visual browsers, and the tab order of the document follow the source and not the visual display. This makes it easy to create a disconnected and difficult to use experience if we essentially jumble up the display of elements, moving them away from how they appear in the document. I still think that an issue we need to solve is how to allow developers to indicate that the visual display should be considered the correct order rather than the document order.

The Grid Specification moved on

Some of the issues in this early version of the grid spec were apparent in my article. I needed to use a pre-processor, to calculate the columns an element would span. This was partly due to the fact that the early grid specifications did not have a concept of the gap property. In addition the initial spec did not include auto-placement and therefore each item had to be explicitly placed onto the grid. The basics of the final specification were there, however over the years that followed the specification was refined and developed. We got gaps, and auto-placement, and the grid-template-areas property was introduced. By the time Grid shipped in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari many of the sticky things I had encountered when writing this article were resolved.

2015: Grid, Flexbox, Box Alignment: Our New System for Layout

Latest web browser versions: Edge 13, Firefox 43, Safari 9, Chrome 47

Grid still hadn’t shipped in more browsers but the specification had moved on. We had support for gaps, with the grid-row-gap, grid-column-gap and grid-gap properties. My own thinking about the specification, and the related specifications had developed. I had started teaching grid not as a standalone module, but alongside Flexbox and Box Alignment. I was trying to demonstrate how these modules worked together to create a layout system for modern web development.

Another place my thinking had moved on since my initial Grid article in 2012, was in terms of content reordering and accessibility. In July of 2015 I wrote an article entitled, Modern CSS Layout, Power and Responsibility in which I outlined these concerns.

Some things change, and some stay the same. The grid- prefixed gap properties were ultimately moved into the Box Alignment specification in order that they could be defined for Flex layout and any other layout method which in future required gaps. What I did not expect, was that four years on I would still be being asked about Grid versus Flexbox:

“A question I keep being asked is whether CSS grid layout and flexbox are competing layout systems, as though it might be possible to back the loser in a CSS layout competition. The reality, however, is that these two methods will sit together as one system for doing layout on the web, each method playing to certain strengths and serving particular layout tasks.”

2016: What next for CSS Grid Layout?

Latest web browser versions: Edge 15, Firefox 50, Safari 10, Chrome 55

In 2016, we still didn’t have Grid in browsers, and I was increasingly looking like I was selling CSS vaporware. However, with the spec at Candidate Recommendation, and it looking likely that we would have grid in at least two browsers in the spring, I wrote an article about what might come next for grid.

The main subject was the subgrid feature, which had by that point been removed from the Level 1 specification. The CSS Working Group were still trying to decide whether a version of subgrid locked to both dimensions would be acceptable. In this version we would have declared display: subgrid on the grid item, after which its rows and columns would be locked to the tracks of the parent. I am very glad that it was ultimately decided to allow for one-dimensional subgrids. This means that you can use the column tracks of the parent, yet have an implicit grid for the rows. This enables patterns such as the one I described in A design pattern solved by subgrid. At the end of 2019, we don’t yet have wide browser support for subgrid, however Firefox has already shipped the value in Firefox 71. Hopefully other browsers will follow suit.

Level 2 of the grid specification ultimately became all about adding support for subgrid, and so we don’t yet have any of the other features I mentioned in that piece. All of those features are detailed in issues in the CSS Working Group Github repo, and aren’t forgotten about. As we come to decide features for Level 3, perhaps some of them will make the cut.

It was worth waiting for subgrid, as the one-dimensional version gives us so much more power, and as I take a look back over these 24 ways articles it really underlines how much of a long game contributing to the platform is. I mentioned in the closing paragraph of my 2016 article that you should not feel ignored if your idea or use case is not immediately discussed and added to a spec, and that is still the case. Those of us involved in specifying CSS, and in implementing CSS in browsers care very much about your feedback. We have to balance that with the need for this stuff to be right.

2017: Christmas Gifts for Your Future Self: Testing the Web Platform

Latest web browser versions: Edge 16, Firefox 57, Safari 11, Chrome 63

In 2017 I stepped away from directly talking about layout, and instead published an article about testing. Not about testing your own code, but about the Web Platform Tests project, and how contributing to the tests which help to ensure interoperability between browsers could benefit the platform - and you.

This article is still relevant today as it was two years ago. I’m often asked by people how they can get involved with CSS, and testing is a great place to start. Specifications need tests in order to progress to become Recommendations, therefore contributing tests can materially help the progress of a spec. You can also help to free up the time of spec editors, to make edits to their specs, by contributing tests they might otherwise need to work on.

The Web Platform Tests project has recently got new and improved documentation. If you have some time to spare and would like to help, take a look and see if you can identify some places that are in need of tests. You will learn a lot about the CSS specs you are testing while doing so, and you can feel that you are making a useful and much-needed contribution to the development of the web platform.

2018: Researching a Property in the CSS Specifications

Latest web browser versions: Edge 17, Firefox 64, Safari 12, Chrome 71

I almost stayed away from layout in my 2018 piece, however I did feature the Grid Layout property grid-auto-rows in this article. If you want to understand how to dig up all the details of a CSS property, then this article is still useful.

One thing that has changed since I began writing for 24 ways, is the amount of great information available to help you learn CSS. Whether you are someone who prefers to read like me, or a person who learns best from video, or by following along with a tutorial, it’s all out there for you. You don’t have to rely on understanding the specifications, though I would encourage everyone to become familiar with doing so, if just to be able to fact check a tutorial which seems to be doing something other than the resulting code.

2019: And that’s a wrap

Latest web browser versions: Edge 18, Firefox 71, Safari 12, Chrome 79

This year is the final countdown for 24 ways. With so many other publications creating great content, perhaps there is less of a need for an avalanche of writing in the closing days of each year. The archive will stay as a history of what was important, what we were thinking, and the problems of the day - many of which we have now solved in ways that the authors could never have imagined at the time. I can see through my articles how my thinking evolved over the years, and I’m as excited about what comes next as I was back in 2005, wondering how to make CSS layout easier.

About the author

Rachel Andrew is a Director of edgeofmyseat.com, a UK web development consultancy and creators of the small content management system, Perch; a W3C Invited Expert to the CSS Working Group; and Editor in Chief of Smashing Magazine. She is the author of a number of books including The New CSS Layout for A Book Apart and a Google Developer Expert for Web Technologies.

She curates a popular email newsletter on CSS Layout, and is passing on her layout knowledge over at her CSS Layout Workshop.

When not writing about business and technology on her blog at rachelandrew.co.uk or speaking at conferences, you will usually find Rachel running up and down one of the giant hills in Bristol, or attempting to land a small aeroplane while training for her Pilot’s license.

More articles by Rachel

New York : Springer, [2007]

Dewey Library - HX236.5.S6293 2020

Dewey Library - HV7561.H85 2020