Hello World

February 20, 23

First words

It seems to be a little bit cliché I named the first article “Hello World.” But you know what – it feels right on design slash dev related blog. I’ve had a website before but it didn’t have a blog and I didn’t communicate anything except my portfolio. So “Hello” again or “Ahoj” as we say here in Czech Republic.

English is not my mother language and sometimes you can find weird phrases, word combinations, wrong tenses or other grammar mistakes. I hope everything will be fine with you. My plan for content is no plan. I’ll write anything what comes in my mind – CSS, Less, HTML, Pug, Sketch or random thought. In the upcoming months I’ll be starting to learning Blender a Three.js so maybe I’ll post interesting notes from that. But let’s start how I build this page first.

Under the hood

I’m a designer with skills in HTML, CSS and little bit of JavaScript. That said, I’ve decided to stay in these waters and build static website, even with a blog in mind.

HTML

I use Pug for generating HTML. What do I like about it?

Syntax based on indentation: tab, tab, tab
Stripping angle brackets and closing tags which makes code much cleaner
Templates for making global changes in few files
Calling JS methods within Pug file. For example, in template of this article I use toLocaleDateString() for date formatting
And loops, mixins, variables and other good stuff Pug offers

Styles

Styling is done by CSS (shocker). In this case I use Less as my favorite CSS preprocessor. When I’ve started to learn CSS years ago, company I work for had been using Less. So am I. I’ve used Sass with SCSS syntax in couple of projects but I didn’t see a reason to switch. Maybe I’ll try Sass with indented syntax, that could be nice. Anyway, what do I like about Less?

Organizing styles into multiple files
Nesting selectors
Mixins and variables for not doing the same thing over and over again. Good chunk of variables I need can be now done by pure CSS Custom Properties. That was not the case few years back
@import (reference) for making variables and mixins available in certain files without compiling the imported one

Writing

When thinking about a blog, Markdown is a must. I’ve been using Markdown for writing and notes more than 10 years. I’ve wanted my blog to be as simple as possible – throw .md files in a folder and make things happen. Thankfully there is gulp-mvb plugin which is pure gold.

Typography

Bookerly
Overpass Mono
Marvin Visions