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In this chapter, we'll write the majority of CSS for our photo gallery project. You'll learn how to apply numerous CSS3 properties to real world scenarios.
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[?music?]
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[CSS]
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[Nick Pettit] So now we're ready to move on to the CSS
0:05
and the first thing that we're going to do
0:09
is we're going to go ahead and create our CSS file
0:12
and we're going to call it application.css.
0:16
The reason we're calling it application is typically you have other CSS
0:21
that you're including in your project, which, in our case, is Blueprint.
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Using the file name "application" indicates that this CSS is application-specific,
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or it's specific to our project,
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so we'll create application.css inside of the CSS folder,
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and the first that we're going to do is we're going to select our body
0:44
body {
0:49
and we're going to use multiple backgrounds, which is new in CSS3,
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and we're also going to use CSS3 gradients.
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So first, we're going to include an image,
1:00
so we'll jump out of our CSS directory,
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we'll go into the ('../images/'); directory
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and we're going to use the image noise.png.
1:13
And then below this, we're going to create a gradient.
1:17
So we'll start out with the -webkit-gradeent;
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and this is going to be a radial gradient,
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we're going to set the inner circle, just like that,
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and we'll set the outer circle just like that.
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And this gradient will be going from
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a sort of gray color (#888) that's pretty light
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to (#222) a darker gray color.
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We're going to set this background to no-repeat.
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So let's go ahead and switch over to our HTML
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and just after blueprint, we'll go ahead and include our style sheet.
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So we'll link it in there: <link href="css/application.css">
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and it's in the CSS directory
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and it's called application.css
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The media type is screen
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media="screen"
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We'll say rel="style sheet"
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and of course the type="text/css"
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and I'll close that tag there />
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And now, when we switch over to Google Chrome and refresh the page,
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you can see that we have this really nice gradient going,
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and you'll also notice that we have some very subtle noise
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overlaid on top of our gradient.
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This is a really nice trick to use.
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It's always good to add just a little bit of noise to your gradient
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because not only does it give it some variation;
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it also combats color banding when you don't quite have all the colors you need
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to display a smooth gradient.
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So let's go ahead and switch back to our CSS
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and we need to do the equivalent of this in Firefox,
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which is a little bit different.
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So let's go ahead and jump down to the next line.
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And again, we're going to use the same image for our noise,
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so we'll say "../images/noise.png"
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And then after the comma, we'll say -moz-radial-gradient;
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because in Firefox, the property name is where we specify
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if we want a radial or linear gradient
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and we'll say this gradient is centered,
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punch in a few values here 260px 0deg
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It's going to be a circular gradient and we want this gradient to hit the closest-side,
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and we'll give it the same color values here, going from our lighter gray #888 0%
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to our darker gray #222 110%.
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And again, we don't want this to repeat.
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And then, finally, as a fallback measure, we'll go ahead and set our background-color
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to our darker gray #222
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and that's just in case browsers don't support multiple backgrounds
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or don't support gradients.
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So let's go ahead and switch over to Firefox and we'll refresh the page
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and that's what our gradient looks like there.
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And again, that's what our gradient looks like in Google Chrome.
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So let's switch back to our text editor.
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Next, we're going to include some web fonts,
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and in order to do that, we're going to go to
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code.google.com/webfonts.
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And here, we're going to grab two different web fonts.
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The first web font is going to be for our h1 up at the top here,
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and the next one is going to be for our paragraph text down at the bottom here.
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So let's go ahead and look through the Google web font directory.
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I'm going to go ahead and sort by alphabet because I know what font I'm looking for.
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The first one we're going to get is called Just Me Again Down Here,
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so we'll go ahead and click on that font
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and we'lll say Use This Font,
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and to use this font in our web page,
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we just need to go ahead and copy this link tag,
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and we'll switch over to our text editor.
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Right before our style sheets here, we'll go ahead and paste in that font.
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And now, in our CSS, we can go ahead and use that font.
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So we need to find one more font, and this one is called Raleway.
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so we'll go ahead and scroll down to Raleway here,
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and we'll say Use This Font, and again,
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we'll just double-click and copy this here,
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and we'll paste it right after our first font.
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And there we go.
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Now we can switch over to our CSS
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and we'll go ahead and select our first-level headline h1 {
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and we'll say font-family: "Just Me Again Down Here";
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and as a fallback, we'll use arial, serif;
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and then we'll set the font-size: 6em;
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because we want that font to be pretty large.
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We'll set the font-weight: normal;
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we'll give it some margin: 12px 0px 30 px
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just to separate it from other elements.
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We'll give it a white color: #FFF;
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because it is on a dark background.
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We want to align this text center;
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and we'll also give it a very slight text-shadow.
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The X offset will be 0px,
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the Y offset will be 2px,
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the blur radius will be 1px,
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and we'll set that shadow to black #000;.
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It will really make the text pop off of the lighter colored gradient.
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So let's go ahead and switch over to Google Chrome
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and we'll refresh the page,
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and there you can see we are now using our font and there's a very slight text shadow
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just underneath it--like I said--to separate it from the lighter colored gradient.
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So now, we need to go ahead and style this second-level headline down here,
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and this paragraph text here, which right now
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you can't even see because it's against a dark background.
8:30
So we'll go ahead and make some room to work here,
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and we'll select our second-level headline.
8:38
Again, we'll give it a white color #FFF.
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We'll set the font-family: "Raleway",
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and we'll use arial, serif as our fallbacks again.
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We'll set the font-weight: bold;
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and again, we're going to give this second-level headline
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a slight text-shadow: and the X offset will be 0px,
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the Y offset will be -1px, which will put the shadow just above our text by 1 pixel.
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We'll set the blur radius to 1px, and we'll set this shadow to black #000
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and this is a really neat trick.
9:28
I'm going to go ahead and refresh the page here.
9:30
As you can see, we have white text and our shadow is just above the text,
9:33
which will make the text look like it's inset or pressed into the page.
9:40
So let's go ahead and style our paragraph text now.
9:44
So we'll go ahead and select our paragraph p {
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and we'll scroll down here a little bit.
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And again, we're going to set the font-family: "Raleway"
9:56
and our fallbacks will once again be arial, serif.
10:02
We're going to set the color to a very light gray color. #CCC
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We don't want to set this to be completely white because from a design point of view,
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it will create a little bit too much texture on the page
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if we have it as a pure white color,
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so we want to make it just a little bit lighter.
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We'll set the font-size: 1.3em;
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we'll set the line-height: 1.2em
10:29
and let's go ahead and switch over to the browser
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and see what that looks like.
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Now, what I'm noticing here is that this text looks pretty good,
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but the problem right now is that we have very long lines
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that go all the way across the page.
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And so, when you get to the end of a line, it's very difficult to pick up the next line
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at the other side of the page.
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We can mitigate this issue by using the multi-column layout module
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which is new in CSS3.
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So let's go ahead and switch back to the browser,
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and let's go ahead and make this work in webkit first.
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-webkit-column-count: 2;
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We'll say webkit-column-gap: 80px;
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and we'll set the gap to 80 pixels.
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This is the amount of space that is between our two columns.
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And then we'll set webkit-column-rule
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to 1px wide solid
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and we'll set it to a dark gray color #333.
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Now, because this column-rule will be on a dark gray background
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and it's a dark gray color, it will just appear to be a very light border
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between our two columns.
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So let's go ahead and switch over to our browser and refresh the page.
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That's already looking a lot better.
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That's much more readable than it was before.
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So let's go ahead and make this work in Mozilla.
12:04
We'll use the exact same properties here,
12:08
only instead of webkit,
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we're just going to change all these to Mozilla.
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So we'll just change the vendor prefix there -moz
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and now, we'll go ahead and switch over to Firefox and we'll refresh the page.
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And of course you can see our font is up there at the top,
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we have our font for the second-level headline,
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and we have our multi-column layout, just like that.
12:35
Now, another design tip here:
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you may be tempted to justify this text
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when you have this sort of ugly-looking rag here,
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but you want to keep that rag there
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because when you justify the text,
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it makes the actual outline of the text on the page a bit too strong
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and the variable word spacing makes the text really difficult to read.
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So while this rag may or may not look good to you,
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it's a lot better than the alternative, which is really strange word spacing.
13:07
So let's go ahead and switch back to our text editor,
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and now, we're going to move on to the stage area,
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which is where all of our photos are.
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So let's go ahead and select the #stage {
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we're going to give it a light-colored background: #000;
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we're going to give it an explicit height: 368px;
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we're going to give it 10px of padding,
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we'll give it margin on the top and bottom
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but not on the left and right,
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and let's just make a little bit more space to work here.
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So next, we're going to give it a -webkit-box-shadow:
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and we're going to use the value inset here
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and this shadow will actually appear inside of our div
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rather than outside, so we'll go ahead and set the rest of our values here.
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We'll say 0px on the X, 0px on the Y.
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We'll give it 5px of blur radius and we'll set the color to black #000.
14:15
Of course, we also need to make this work in Firefox,
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so we'll change -webkit to -moz and we can actually keep the exact same values there,
14:24
just like that.
14:30
We're also going to use a border-radius of 20px;
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-moz-border-radius: 20px;
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and in webkit, we can actually just use the border-radius property now
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without the vendor prefix.
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In Firefox, we do need to still say moz.
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We're going to set the position: relative;
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and we're going to use this neat little property called -webkit-user-select
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and we're going to set that to none, and what that will do is in webkit,
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when somebody tries to select the photos, they won't be able to actually select them,
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so it'll make the gallery a little bit nicer when we're actually interacting with it.
15:13
So let's go ahead and switch over to Google Chrome.
15:18
So here you can see we already have our stage
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and it has a really nice inset shadow here
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and we have our curved borders, so let's go ahead and switch over to Firefox
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and we'll refresh, and let's look at our stage here.
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It looks like we're doing pretty well in both browsers
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so let's go ahead and switch back to our text editor.
15:41
And now, we're actually going to use transitions
15:44
to make our photos animate when we click on them.
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So first, we'll select our staging area
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and then we want to select all of the images
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that are children of our stage area.
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So we'll go ahead and open that up
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and first, we'll do our -webkit-transition.
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We want to transition on all properties.
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We'll make the transition last for 0.2 seconds
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and we want to use the animation curve ease-in-out;
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and this looks exactly the same in Firefox;
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we just need to change the vendor prefix -moz, just like that.
16:25
Now, we're going to go ahead and style each of our photos,
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so we'll select all of our photos inside of the stage.
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#stage .photo {
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We're going to give them an explicit width: 190px;
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we're going to give them a height: 140px;
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a background of white #FFF;
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we're going to give them a border:
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10px solid #FFF; and that will make
17:03
a nice little Polaroid effect with a white border all the way around our images,
17:07
and we're going to set their position: absolute;.
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So now we're going to create a hover state for our photos,
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so we'll go ahead and select the #stage.
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We'll select all the photos inside and create a hover state for them.
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#stage .photo:hover {
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We'll give them a -webkit-box-shadow
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when we hover over them,
17:36
and for the color of this particular shadow, we're going to use the rgba color model
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and we'll set that to black (0,0,0,
17:45
and then we'll set the opacity to 0.9
17:48
and this will look exactly the same in Firefox,
17:51
so we'll just change the vendor prefix
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from -webkit to -moz.
17:56
And another nice thing we should do
17:58
is set the cursor: pointer
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so that when people hover over the photos,
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even though they're not anchor tags,
18:06
they'll still get that nice pointer cursor so that they know that they can click on those photos.
18:09
So now comes the tedious part.
18:15
We need to absolutely position all of our photos.
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Now, I know what some of you experts are thinking--
18:20
this is not exactly the best way to do this,
18:23
but we'll address this later on in this Master Class.
18:26
So first, we'll select our first photo,
18:29
#photo01 { top:
18:32
we'll set the top offset to 22px;
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and we'll set the left offset to 22px;
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and then, we're just going to copy this and we'll paste it eight times,
18:45
and then we'll adjust all the values,
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so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, plus the first one we did.
18:51
And then we'll change all of these selectors
18:57
so that we're selecting the proper photos here.
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Then we just need to adjust mostly the left values here,
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so we'll say this one is 256px offset,
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this one is 490px offset,
19:15
this one is 724px offset.
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And then, we get to the second row of photos
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and these are obviously going to have a different top offset of 206px.
19:29
We just need to adjust the offsets for left, just like we did before,
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so we'll set that to 256px, 490px, and 724px.
19:44
Now, you can tell I already did all of the math for you here,
19:53
but this will lay the photos out in a nice, neat grid.
19:57
So let's just go ahead and clean up our text a little bit there;
20:00
it's always good to have nice, readable CSS.
20:03
And we'll save that out, and let's go ahead and switch over to Google Chrome
20:06
and see how we're doing.
20:10
So we'll go ahead and refresh the page, and there, you can see we now have
20:12
these nice, absolutely positioned photos,
20:15
and when we hover over them, we get that really nice transition on the box shadow.
20:18
So let's go ahead and switch over to Firefox and see how we're doing there.
20:25
We'll refresh the page,
20:29
and here you can see we have the exact same thing.
20:31
We have these really nice transitions on the hover state
20:35
with these box shadows,
20:38
so let's go ahead and switch over to TextMate and just finish this up.
20:40
We'll select our stage again
20:45
#stage .large_photo {
20:47
and we'll go ahead and create this class large_photo,
20:57
which we'll be using in just a second, but for now, let's go ahead and fill out these values.
21:00
Large_photo class is going to be for when we actually click on the photos
21:06
and they enlarge.
21:13
We'll set this to position: absolute;
21:15
and we've given it an explicit width and height.
21:18
We'll set the top offset to 0px;
21:22
and the left offset to 200px.
21:26
We want this photo to appear on top of all of our other photos,
21:29
so we'll set the z-index: 1000 just to ensure that it's always on top.
21:34
We'll set a -webkit-transform on this
21:41
and we'll say rotate(-5deg) degrees
21:46
and what this will do is create a really nice rotation effect
21:51
when we go ahead and enlarge our photo; it will just sort of offset our photo slightly
21:55
and give it a little bit more life.
22:00
So we'll go ahead and copy and paste that
22:02
and change the vendor prefix to -moz
22:04
for Firefox, and again, we want to say cursor: pointer
22:09
because this is going to be something that is clickable.
22:13
We also want to set a slightly larger border on this.
22:18
We'll set it to border: 15px solid white #FFF;
22:21
and we're going to have this slightly thicker border on it
22:27
because the photo should appear as though it's actually coming at you in the browser
22:31
along the z-plane.
22:36
So we'll go ahead and set a -webkit-box-shadow on this,
22:38
and again, because the photo is supposed to appear as though it's further off the page
22:43
or as though it's lifting off the page,
22:48
we want to set a slightly larger shadow on this.
22:51
So we'll set the offsets to 0px 0px,
22:54
we'll set the blur radius to 30px,
22:57
and we'll go ahead and set this to be pure black #000;
23:00
and we'll go ahead and copy and paste this,
23:07
and we'll just, once again, change the vendor prefix from -webkit to -moz for Mozilla,
23:10
and we won't be able to test this just yet.
23:19
Before we can actually test this class,
23:22
we need to go ahead and write a little bit of jQuery
23:25
so that we can toggle between our photo class
23:28
and our large_photo class.
23:31
So let's go ahead and create a new file inside of our JavaScripts folder.
23:33
We'll go ahead and call this application.js
23:41
because once again, this is our application-specific JavaScript.
23:45
So first, before we can actually start writing any jQuery,
23:51
we need to include jQuery into our project.
23:55
A really great way to do that is to use the Google hosted version
24:00
because if your site visitors have visited other websites
24:04
that already have the Google hosted version,
24:08
it will be cached on their computer and it will make your webpage
24:11
load a little bit faster.
24:14
So just past the CSS here,
24:16
we'll go ahead and open a script tag
24:19
and the source for this is going to be
24:23
"http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5"> which is the current latest version.
24:26
And then, we want the minified version, so we'll say /jquery.min.js".
24:47
And again, that will make our page load a little bit faster.
24:55
So we'll go ahead and close our </script> tag there,
24:59
and then once again, we need to open another script tag
25:02
to include our own JavaScript, and the source for this will be
25:05
src="javascripts/application.js"
25:10
and we need to go ahead and close that just like that.
25:17
So now, we can go ahead and start writing our JavaScript,
25:22
so we'll go ahead and switch over to application.js
25:25
and we want to start this with a self-executing function
25:30
that will run once the page has loaded.
25:34
$(function() {
25:38
});
25:47
And then, we're going to go ahead and use our $ function
25:52
to select all of the images on the page $('img'),
25:55
and when these images are clicked,
26:00
we want to execute a function
26:03
.click(function)() {
26:07
just like that.
26:13
And inside of our function, we want to use $(this) as a reference
26:15
because it's the photo that we're clicking on
26:20
and we want to go ahead and toggleClass
26:23
between photo and large_photo.
26:27
So basically, if the image has the class photo and it is clicked,
26:32
it will switch over to the class large_photo.
26:37
If the photo has the large_photo class and it is clicked,
26:40
it will switch over to the photo class.
26:43
So we'll go ahead and switch over to Google Chrome here,
26:47
and when we refresh the page and click on these,
26:51
you can see that these photos will now enlarge.
26:54
And not only that--they will slightly turn and they will animate
26:57
using the CSS3 transition that we applied.
27:02
So let's go ahead and switch over to Firefox and we'll refresh the page here,
27:05
and same thing--when we click on these photos,
27:09
they will enlarge--just like that.
27:12
Now, one thing I would like to note here is that I am using the Firefox 4 beta
27:15
in which transitions are now supported.
27:20
In prior versions, CSS3 transitions were not supported.
27:23
So now that we've gone ahead and created this project,
27:28
let's look at ways that we can improve it.
27:31
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