Planet Hearth

I’ve been listening to Planet Hearth by Calibre relentlessly over the past couple of days and I’ve found it to be excellent web-surfing and work music. It’s more gentle than Calibre’s previous stuff.

Last night I was listening to it whilst making this CSS carousel below—I quickly fell into a little trance, click-clacking bits of new-ish CSS together. Although it doesn’t look like much, this bad boy uses zero JavaScript and, with the help of CSS Grid, it would take maybe four lines of CSS to make it responsive, too.

It feels very webbish to me. Like the way it hijacks your scroll isn’t offensive and although carousels are rightfully despised by web designers, I do think they have a use. I can imagine this thing being perfect for a fashion site. Or it could be used to hop to bits of text in some documentation. Or maybe a graphic design portfolio. Or something something books.

Last night was one of those moments where I realized just how far CSS has come. It’s no longer this thing you can shrug off, or sit back and laugh about its flaws. Centering things in CSS is just two lines of code now. Yikes.

So much time and energy has been spent improving things by browser manufacturers, engineers, designers, and advocates. Things on the web don’t just improve all by themselves—they require countless hours of arguing, and prototyping, building, and then educating. But all these little features build on top of one another to make something incredibly beautiful. So much so, than when I started my career in web design, making something like the above would be a giant pain but now it takes about 20 minutes to make something almost production ready.

Anyway, I’ll be sure to write about how I made it for the CSS-Tricks newsletter this weekend, probably whilst bopping along to Planet Hearth again.