Description
We think the web is an exciting place. In recent years CSS has become an incredibly powerful language. Many of its possibilities haven’t been explored in full yet. Some parts of the CSS spec are largely ignored, while others are so big and powerful that we don’t yet understand what we can do with it. To our students the fun task of exploring the uncharted parts of CSS.
Further details about the course and the assignment
We asked our students pick one of three assignments: (1) a restaurant menu, (2) an art directed magazine article, or (3) any better idea they may have.
Next we asked them to pick one of these contexts: add a print stylesheet, consider users who ticked the prefers-reduced-motion setting, consider those who prefer a dark-mode on their OS, or design different interaction based on pointer-type. Again, they are allowed to pick a better context if they like.
In order to give them some clear boundaries we asked them to work with two of the following constrains:
- When SVG meets CSS: Shapes / Masks / SVG
- Two colours
- Less than 5kb CSS (not as an excuses for lazyness, hahaha)
- No squares, no rectangles, no circles, no triangles
- Design must be visually appealing and it must meet Level AAA conformance of the WCAG.
- Solar powered website
- Responsive without media queries
- Design responds to weather/time
- Design responds to connectivity
- Design responds to battery level
- Design responds to language setting
- Design responding language setting / Japanese / English / Greek / Mongolian
- Create a great experience only with pop-ups, advertising banners and carousels!
And finally we asked them to work with the Selector First CSS Methodology because we believe the power of selectors should be known. In practice it means that they have to use a wide variety of CSS selectors in their code. ID’s are only allowed to trigger the :target selector. If you really need them, you are allowed to use a few classes.
Student work
Lecturers
Program
This course is given at Communication and Multimedia Design, a design bachelor focused on interactive digital products and services. CMD is part of the Faculty of Digital Media and Creative Industries at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.
Conduct
This course has a Code of Conduct. Anyone interacting with this repository, organisation, or community is bound by it. Staff and students of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam) are additionally bound by the Regulation Undesirable Conduct (Regeling Ongewenst Gedrag).