Building Flexible Components With Transparency
I sometimes forget that transparent colours can solve certain contrast and design issues like the following:
The panel is using a subtle gray (
#ddd
) to draw a border between its contents and the surrounding page. But when the page background gets closer to#ddd
, the design doesn’t work as well.Using transparency, we can keep the same effect on white backgrounds while ensuring increased contrast on other backgrounds. Here I use a black color set to
0.135
opacity instead:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.135)
. This matches#ddd
on white backgrounds but automatically appears darker on other backgrounds:
This technique also works well on lightly colored backgrounds. The panel will pick up the underlying colors and display them through the transparent black:
Cassie Evans' blog animations
There are so many wonderful animations on Cassie Evans’ website that I love, from the way the site title is drawn in to all the effects when you hover/interact with certain things.
Regional Australia Bank: Priority+ responsive navigation menu
This is one of the best responsive navigation menus I’ve seen, implementing the priority+ pattern while mixing in drop-downs and other features.
Container-Adapting Tabs With "More" Button
This looks like an excellent, accessible starting point for the priority navigation pattern:
Or the priority navigation pattern, or progressively collapsing navigation menu. We can name it in at least three ways.
There are multiple UX solutions for tabs and menus and each of them have their own advantages over another, you just need to pick the best for the case you are trying to solve. At design and development agency Kollegorna we were debating on the most appropriate UX technique for tabs for our client’s website…
We agreed it should be a one-liner because the amount of tab items is unknown and narrowed our options down to two: horizontal scroll and adaptive with “more” button. Firstly, the problem with the former one is that horizontal scroll as a feature is not always visually obvious for users (especially for narrow elements like tabs) whereas what else can be more obvious than a button (“more”), right? Secondly, scrolling horizontally using a mouse-controlled device isn’t a very comfortable thing to do, so we might need to make our UI more complex with additional arrow buttons. All considered, we ended up choosing the later option[.]