An Event Apart Minneapolis

Saturday, August 20th, 2011

Last week I had the opportunity to attend An Event Apart (AEA) when it stopped by Minneapolis. AEA is a conference “for people who make websites” taught by some of the best known names in web design. I had seen Jeffery Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, Jeremy Keith, Jared Spool, Kristina Halvorson, and Luke Wroblewski speak at various trips to Austin for South by Southwest (SXSW), but all these talks were fresh content.

Every speaker did a great job and had tons of good information, but a few of the talks stood out and got me really excited about what I was learning. The talks that were the most inspirational for me were Eric Meyer’s talk about using flexible boxes, Nicole Sullivan on optimizing CSS, and Ethan Marcotte on responsive web design. The future of designing sites for multiple devices looks very promising with the combination of the flexible boxes and responsive design (media queries). The great part is that the boxes allow content to be reordered for different purposes where it has previously been difficult to do using floats (without absolute positioning). If you don’t know about media queries check out the original responsive design article.

If you’ve got a chance to attend An Event Apart I’d highly recommend it. While it didn’t have the variety, scale, or full immersion in a sea of web geeks like SXSW, it had many of its own benefits. At AEA there weren’t giant lines, missed panels that were at capacity, or most importantly – panels that didn’t have any valuable content. There wasn’t a session here that didn’t deliver! Overall it was a much more focused and professionally delivered effort (food was also great and I got to sit next to Zeldman at lunch!).

I put together a PDF of my AEA notes if you’d like to get an idea of what was covered.

Posted in CSS, HTML | No Comments »

How to Create Pie Charts with CSS3

Thursday, January 27th, 2011

Last week I decided to update my online resume to make it a little more graphical, because well… I’m a designer. The first step was coming up with some good ways to represent data, and pie charts seemed like a good fit to show skill development. Pie charts are pretty simple to create using a spreadsheet program or a drawing program, but I wanted something out of the ordinary that didn’t require creating new graphics every time I update them. It seemed like it should be possible with the new capabilities of CSS3 so I started working on a solution.

The two most promising things I found were Google’s Chart Wizard, (which uses javascript) and a CSS3 Pie Chart Article from Atomic Noggin. I wanted to do something purely with CSS & HTML so I took the ideas from that article and tweaked them a bit to get the result that I wanted.

There were a few things that I wanted to do differently from the original article:

1. In the article the pie pieces are pulled out from the sphere and I wanted a solid circle.
2. Once aligned as a solid sphere there were some rendering issues (in some browsers) aligning clipped shapes next to each other that left gaps between the shapes.
3. I wanted to be able to add styles to the full sphere such as a border or drop-shadow.

Creating a Drop-Shadowed Circle

My first step was creating a circle that will be the bottom layer of the chart. This bottom circle will also hold any border or drop-shadow style. Additionally, I’ve put a div with a set height around the circle so it stays inline with the content (as the circles will be absolutely positioned to stay on top of each other). To create a circle, simply add a border-radius that is half the pixel value of the width of a square div. You’ll notice below I’ve used browser specific css tags (e.g. -moz-border-radius) for the CSS3 elements. Currently CSS3 support is varied between browsers. Eventually, as full support is included in browsers, you won’t need them any more and this will be much simpler to manage.

<style>
     .pieContainer {
          height: 100px;
     }
     .pieBackground {
          background-color: grey;
          position: absolute;
          width: 100px;
          height: 100px;
          -moz-border-radius: 50px;
          -webkit-border-radius: 50px;
          -o-border-radius: 50px;
          border-radius: 50px;
          -moz-box-shadow: -1px 1px 3px #000;
          -webkit-box-shadow: -1px 1px 3px #000;
          -o-box-shadow: -1px 1px 3px #000;
          box-shadow: -1px 1px 3px #000;
     }
</style>
<div id="pieContainer">
     <div class="pieBackground"></div>
</div>

Adding a Slice of the Pie

Next you’ll want to create a half circle by using clipping to hide the 2nd half. Unless you want exactly 50% you’ll need to change the size of that circle by dropping it inside of a div that controls the rotation and use the inner div to adjust the size. For the first slice we’ll start the outer div at 0 degrees, which is the default, so we’ll only need to edit that for additional slices. (* Note that I’m adding to the code above and only displaying the new CSS.)

<style>
     .pie {
          position: absolute;
          width: 100px;
          height: 100px;
          -moz-border-radius: 50px;
          -webkit-border-radius: 50px;
          -o-border-radius: 50px;
          border-radius: 50px;
          clip: rect(0px, 50px, 100px, 0px);
     }
     .hold {
          position: absolute;
          width: 100px;
          height: 100px;
          -moz-border-radius: 50px;
          -webkit-border-radius: 50px;
          -o-border-radius: 50px;
          border-radius: 50px;
          clip: rect(0px, 100px, 100px, 50px);
     }
     #pieSlice1 .pie {
          background-color: #1b458b;
          -webkit-transform:rotate(50deg);
          -moz-transform:rotate(50deg);
          -o-transform:rotate(50deg);
          transform:rotate(50deg);
     }
</style>

<div class="pieContainer">
     <div class="pieBackground"></div>
     <div id="pieSlice1" class="hold"><div class="pie"></div></div>
</div>

Large & Multiple Slices

If you’d like to make a slice take up more than 50% of the pie you’ll just need to add another pie div of the same color with a hold div wrapped around it. To add a slice in a new color just change the background color. Below is an example of making a slice over 50% and a second slice of a new color.

<style>
     #pieSliceBlue .pie {
          background-color: #1b458b;
          -webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);
          -moz-transform:rotate(180deg);
          -o-transform:rotate(180deg);
          transform:rotate(180deg);
     }
     #pieSliceBlue2 {
          -webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);
          -moz-transform:rotate(180deg);
          -o-transform:rotate(180deg);
          transform:rotate(180deg);
     }
     #pieSliceBlue2 .pie {
          background-color: #1b458b;
          -webkit-transform:rotate(40deg);
          -moz-transform:rotate(40deg);
          -o-transform:rotate(40deg);
          transform:rotate(40deg);
     }
     #pieSliceRed {
          -webkit-transform:rotate(220deg);
          -moz-transform:rotate(220deg);
          -o-transform:rotate(220deg);
          transform:rotate(220deg);
     }
     #pieSliceRed .pie {
          background-color: #cc0000;
          -webkit-transform:rotate(140deg);
          -moz-transform:rotate(140deg);
          -o-transform:rotate(140deg);
          transform:rotate(140deg);
     }
</style>

<div class="pieContainer">
     <div class="pieBackground"></div>
     <div id="pieSliceBlue" class="hold"><div class="pie"></div></div>
     <div id="pieSliceBlue2" class="hold"><div class="pie"></div></div>
     <div id="pieSliceRed" class="hold"><div class="pie"></div></div>
</div>

IE Fallback

As expected, this doesn’t work in any Internet Explorer browsers below version 9. If you’re concerned about IE users, a simple way to fix this is adding a conditional comment for IE with a jpg of whatever charts you’re trying to display.

Posted in CSS, HTML | 3 Comments »