I recently looked at the CSS chapter of the Web Alamanc and had some thoughts. Here, Stefan Judis looks at the whole thing and rounds up the most interesting bits to him. Here are most of them:

• 20% of sites don’t compress their JavaScript.
• React is on 5% of sites while jQuery is on 85% of sites. (Hence my tongue-in-cheek Tweet)
• Native JavaScript imports are under 1% (we’re all still bundling, which for the time being, we’re told is the way to go).
• Flexbox usage is at 50% and grid only 2%. (I previously remarked at how wild I think this is, with browser support being not terribly different and grid being, IMO, generally more useful.)
• 20% of sites use responsive images. (Interesting as WordPress does it out of the box, and powers some 34% of the web. Maybe a lot of really old outdated WordPress versions out there?)
• font-display usage is at 26%, which blows me away as it’s fairly new and a little esoteric (as much as I love it).
• HTTPS at 80%. Also surprising considering what a pain in the butt it is if your host doesn’t make it a default part of their offering.
• 4 of 5 sites ship with color contrast issues. Not suprising, but I wonder how many false positives are in here. I’ve seen a lot of that with automated tooling.
• 1 of 4 sites don’t specify a lang attribute.
• 4 of 5 forms don’t ship with labels for their input elements. WHATTTTTT.
• 0.44% sites use a service worker. I’m a fan, but they are (1) too hard and (2) feel too dangerous to dabble in.
• 2 of 3 pages have a huge content shift while loading. (Remember to put width and height attributes on images now, which prevents content shifting. Huge.)
• We hear about WordPress powering 1/3 of the web, but another interesting related stat is that if you’re using a CMS, there is a 75% chance it’s WordPress.
• Only 20% of sites use a CDN (for the HTML). I’m sure it’s higher for assets.
• We’re still pushing around a 2MB average page size. Everything depends, but if we’re trying to be consious people in general, let’s say we aim for half that.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

The post Highlights of the HTTP Archive Web Almanac appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

We’re all familiar with the phrase, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” And the same is true for good design.

Whether you’re viewing a print advertisement, a website page, or a blog post, the design has a major impact on your perception of the information and the brand.

Think back to the last time you read a 3,000 word blog post with absolutely no images, no thought put into the layout, and no charts or graphs. Unless the information was incredibly compelling, your experiencing reading the blog post was probably pretty unmemorable. Maybe you even stopped reading and clicked off the page half way through. Being “unmemorable” is something that brands today can’t afford if they want to be competitive and win business.

And that is exactly what is at the root of this article—why marketers need to make design a priority in their content marketing. According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), over 90% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers are using content marketing to engage with their audience and generate leads.

Those statistics prove that your prospective customers are facing content overload. To break through the noise, your brand’s marketing assets need to stand out. In fact, you could argue that the design of your content could be the difference between a new customer and a lost sale.

Content + Emotion = Better Sales

You might be wondering how design even fits into a content marketing strategy. After all, you don’t often use the words “writing” and “design” in the same sentence. Writing itself isn’t inherently visual, it’s about getting the facts onto paper and shaping it into a compelling and informative argument with the intent of generating intrigue.

But here’s the thing—design is linked to emotion, on both a conscious and subconscious level. When you decided to stop reading that boring 3,000 word blog post, it’s because you didn’t feel a connection to the content or the brand. The experience didn’t trigger an emotion that made you want to learn more.

We also know that emotion has a huge impact on your brand’s ability to sell to customers. And the design of your content marketing assets can change the way people feel when they’re engaging with them. For example, most people would agree that seeing data laid out in an infographic is much more powerful than reading it in paragraph form.

The design of your content also determines how accessible it is. That’s one of the reasons why videos, webinars, and even podcast hosting are effective lead generation strategies for many companies. You could publish a podcast script as a written Q&A on your blog, but it’s not as accessible as being able to listen to it passively or skip to sections you’re most interested in.

5 Tips for Using Design in Your Content Marketing

A good content marketing strategy starts with—you guessed it—good content. Part of that is using marketing analytics to track the types of content your audience is most interested in. But there’s always room to level up, and integrating good design into your content marketing is one way to do that. Here are some design tips that you can integrate into your content marketing to increase engagement.

1. Use Stock Images Sparingly

Stock photos can be both a blessing and a curse for marketers. On one hand, using stock photos will save you a lot of time and money. But they tend to lack authenticity and are often overused. That can make your content feel generic and uninspiring.

The images you use in your content as just as important as the writing. In fact, content that has images gets 94% more views than content without visuals. If you are going to use stock images, be very selective and use the ones that feel the most real. Better yet, pull out your camera and stage a mini photoshoot in your office for photos that show off your brand’s human side. Another great way to limit your use of stock photos is to use screenshots or create visuals with your data, and paste them throughout the content.

2. Invest in Infographics

Marketers and consumers alike are drawn to infographics. Using infographics can boost your site traffic by 12%, and over 40% of marketers say that infographics are the most engaging form of visual content. Infographics can feel like a daunting task, especially if you don’t have a designer on staff. But there are dozens of tools that can make infographic design a breeze.

Infographics are a great addition to your content marketing because of their versatility. You can add an infographic to a relevant blog post, cut it down into snippets with the most compelling data, and even post it on social media. Infographics are the most effective way to illustrate data, charts and graphs, and make the information memorable. They are easy to digest, highly shareable, and some even go viral.

3. Publish More Ebooks

When it comes to content marketing assets, ebooks are one of the most effective forms of content. It allows you to put a high volume of information into an easy-to-read, easy-to-digest format. Unlike traditional blog posts or white papers, ebooks don’t feel like information overload. It’s a great way to implement design into your content and drive your audience to learn more.

According to HubSpot, your brain can process visual information nearly 60,000 times faster than plain text. So in your next ebook, make sure you’re including images, screenshots, charts and graphs to help you readers remember the highlights. A combination of text and graphics can convey your information in a way that evokes emotion and creates a sense of urgency for the reader that will make them more likely to convert.

The Bottom Line

Good design is an important element of any effective content marketing strategy. Using design can amplify your content, attract more prospective customers, and entice readers to take action and learn more. There are dozens of tools, marketing courses, and resources available to help you determine which types of assets to create, and how to infuse design into your strategy. Marketers today need to be using their content to differentiate their brand from others in the industry, and using good design can help create a lasting impression and elevate your brand’s identity.

const HelloWorldIntentHandler = {

    canHandle(handlerInput) {

        return Alexa.getRequestType(handlerInput.requestEnvelope) === 'IntentRequest'

            && Alexa.getIntentName(handlerInput.requestEnvelope) === 'HelloWorldIntent';

    },

    handle(handlerInput) {

        const speakOutput = 'Hello World!';

        return handlerInput.responseBuilder

            .speak(speakOutput)

            .getResponse();

    }

};

{

    "body": {

        "version": "1.0",

        "response": {

            "outputSpeech": {

                "type": "SSML",

                "ssml": "Hello World!"

            },

            "type": "_DEFAULT_RESPONSE"

        },

        "sessionAttributes": {},

        "userAgent": "ask-node/2.3.0 Node/v8.10.0"

    }

}

'use strict';

// So that you have access to the dialogflow and conversation object
const {  dialogflow } = require('actions-on-google'); 

// So you have access to the request response stuff >> functions.https.onRequest(app)
const functions = require('firebase-functions');

// Create an instance of dialogflow for your app
const app = dialogflow({debug: true});


// Build an intent to be fulfilled by firebase, 
// the name is the name of the intent that dialogflow passes over
app.intent('Default Welcome Intent', (conv) => {
  
  // Any extra logic goes here for the intent, before returning a response for firebase to deal with
    return conv.ask(`Welcome to a firebase fulfillment`);
  
});

// Finally we export as dialogflowFirebaseFulfillment so the inline editor knows to use it
exports.dialogflowFirebaseFulfillment = functions.https.onRequest(app);

{
  "name": "functions",
  "description": "Cloud Functions for Firebase",
  "scripts": {
    "lint": "eslint .",
    "serve": "firebase serve --only functions",
    "shell": "firebase functions:shell",
    "start": "npm run shell",
    "deploy": "firebase deploy --only functions",
    "logs": "firebase functions:log"
  },
  "engines": {
    "node": "10"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "actions-on-google": "^2.12.0",
    "firebase-admin": "~7.0.0",
    "firebase-functions": "^3.3.0"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "eslint": "^5.12.0",
    "eslint-plugin-promise": "^4.0.1",
    "firebase-functions-test": "^0.1.6"
  },
  "private": true
}

{

  "payload": {

    "google": {

      "expectUserResponse": true,

      "richResponse": {

        "items": [

          {

            "simpleResponse": {

              "textToSpeech": "Welcome to a firebase fulfillment"

            }

          }

        ]

      }

    }

  }

}

Market research can be the holy grail of customer insights, revealing motivations behind purchase decisions, behavioral patterns, likes, and dislikes. Information like this can help you make informed decisions about creating new products or services, entering new markets, and more.

Done right, market research can be extremely valuable. But not planning properly or taking the wrong approach with market research can tank your efforts and flush valuable marketing dollars down the drain. We created this in-depth guide to help you avoid this unfortunate situation. Keep reading to learn how to do market research the right way — in four easy-to-digest chapters. But before the synopsis, let us summarize the basic market research process in 6 steps.

How to conduct market research

1. Identify the problem. The problem may be a dilemma you’ve faced in the past and want to avoid facing again or it may be the need for a new revenue-generating opportunity.
2. Establish your budget. Determine how much you’re willing to spend to get the answers you need.
3. Design the research. Decide on factors such as sample size, questions, and method.
4. Collect the data. How you collect market research data will depend entirely on the research method you chose.
5. Analyze and present data. Whatever analysis technique you use, present your findings in a way that clearly and accurately communicates the takeaways.
6. Take action. Once you’ve obtained the information you were looking for, take appropriate action.

Chapter synopsis

• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: What is market research? Start out with a solid foundation by understanding what market research is, what it entails, and why it’s important. Bonus: Get tips on creating a buyer persona.
• Chapter 3: The market research process. How does the market research process work? Find out in this chapter, which walks through the six-step research process, from identifying the problem to taking action.
• Chapter 4: Market research methods. What methods can you use to find answers to your burning questions? There are plenty, but we walk through five frequently used methods, when it’s best to employ them, and pitfalls to watch out for.
• Chapter 5: Market research strategies. When you need to round out your market research efforts or gain some quick insights, these market research strategies are great options.

Remember to bookmark this guide for later reference. Market research can be a complex topic, and as your needs change you may need a refresher on approaches or methods you haven’t used before.

What is market research?

Market research is the process of gathering information about a target audience, typically your customers. The purpose is to understand their wants, needs, and preferences; you can then use that data to benefit your organization in a variety of ways.

Why is market research important? As a critical part of business strategy, market research can inform your decisions on a number of things, including

• Future product offerings. What types of products or additional features might customers like to see?
• Current marketing materials. Are they effective, or can they be tailored differently to achieve better results?
• Service structures. What can you change to improve the customer experience?
• Business processes. How could you change them to achieve better outcomes for customers?

Gathering insights directly from customers gives you the opportunity to check your assumptions. Even the most talented of employees can’t read customers’ minds, which is why asking customers for their input is essential to understanding them.

Market research consultant Annalisa Tammaro adds that conducting market research lowers your risk of making the wrong business decision, such as introducing a new product your customers won’t like: “The importance of market research lies in getting customer feedback on a specific subject early on to ensure you’re heading down the right path. Your research findings then provide a key reference point for all related decisions.”

Market research comes in two flavors: primary research and secondary research. We cover these research types below, along with an important foundational component of market research — the buyer persona.

Primary market research

In short, primary market research is research you either conduct yourself or hire someone to conduct for you for a specific purpose. What makes this type of research primary is that you or your designee are going straight to the source to gather the information you want. If you’ve ever put together a focus group, conducted an interview, or sent out a survey to your customers, you’ve done primary research.

For example, if you’re thinking about redesigning one of your products, you’ll want input from customers regarding what they like and don’t like about it. This will give you a sense of what aspects can be improved during the redesign to make the product more appealing. Seeking input from these customers through a survey or similar method would be considered primary market research.

Secondary market research

In contrast, secondary market research is the process of compiling research that’s already been conducted and analyzed, so you can use it for your benefit. Unlike primary research, secondary research may not have been performed for the same purpose for which you’re using it.

Examples of secondary research include publicly available studies by government agencies, for-purchase studies by research firms like Nielsen and Gartner, reports by trade associations, and data collected by competitors. “Even web searches for interesting statistics can be considered secondary research,” explains Tammaro.

Consider the previous example of wanting to redesign one of your products. Instead of expending the effort of setting up a research study of your own customers, you may purchase a completed study using participants that align with your typical customer persona. Depending on the purpose of the purchased research, you may not get answers to specific questions, but it could still provide tangential insights that inspire you to create a completely new type of product.

The key to market research: Buyer personas

A buyer persona is a collection of demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, quotes, goals, and other identifying aspects that represent your ideal customer. Buyer personas are a critical part of market research because they provide a basis for tailoring your research questions and qualifying the input you receive from research participants.

Tammaro provides a few tips on building a buyer persona:

• Identify patterns from available customer data. For example, if you run an e-commerce store, review visitor demographics and their buying behavior to determine commonalities.
• Segment your customers into smaller groups. Not all customers are alike, especially if you have a broad assortment of products. You may need to create multiple buyer personas based on characteristics like age, income, or personality traits.
• Use multiple research methods. With a survey, you can easily reach many customers and identify broad customer demographics or concerns. However, other methods like one-on-one interviews can provide a deeper perspective and unearth emotional motivators you can use to build an in-depth buyer persona.

Now that we’ve introduced you to market research as a concept, let’s move into how the market research process works.

The market research process

Conducting market research can provide you with a wealth of knowledge and information about your customers, but only if you take a thoughtful approach. You can’t simply come up with a few questions off the cuff and send them out. Effective planning and execution are essential. Start by outlining a clear market research process like the one laid out below by Holly Brown, CEO of Boston Research Services.

Step 1: Identify the problem

Your market research problem will differ from those of other businesses, and even in your own business, it will likely change over time. The problem may be a dilemma you’ve faced in the past and want to avoid facing again, or it may be the need for a new revenue-generating opportunity.

Here are a few examples of potential business problems you can address through market research:

• Customers, prospects, and the general public have a negative perception of your brand.
• You’re confused about exactly what drives customers to purchase your products or services (or, more generally, the types of products and services you provide).
• You believe there’s more potential profit in your products.
• You’re unsure about how customers will respond to an upcoming ad campaign.

Once you’ve identified your overarching business problem, Brown recommends coming up with two or three related objectives to explore. Limiting your objectives “helps you avoid respondent fatigue from asking too many questions, but also ensures you don’t develop tunnel vision.”

Step 2: Establish your budget

Market research always has a cost. You must determine how much you’re willing to spend to get the answers you need. The larger and more complex the problem, the more you should budget, even if you’re doing everything in house.

If you’re willing to let a market research firm do the legwork, Brown recommends contacting three firms for quotes. You’ll need to provide your criteria and audience demographics, among other aspects.

Ensure the quotes you receive include the programming of the survey; field work, such as hosting interviews and gathering data; data analysis; and delivery of results. Be prepared for extra fees if you require additional components, such as regression analysis or segmentation, which are more complex statistical methods for analyzing data.

Step 3: Design the research

This step is the “how” of the market research process, when you decide on factors such as

• Sample size and characteristics. Choosing the right sample size depends on a number of factors. For one, are you reaching out to current customers (which will be limited), a representative sampling of customer look-alikes, or a broad demographic? In addition, your topic can limit the number of available participants. For example, semiconductors are more niche than TVs, meaning there are fewer participants who can answer questions about them.
• Questions. Whatever method you go with, you’ll need to determine exactly what questions to ask and which answer choices to provide, if any. Recall the objectives you set. “If a question doesn’t help achieve one of your objectives, don’t use it,” cautions Brown.
• Method. You’ll need to select a mode of delivery for your questions, such as a survey, interview, or focus group. The questions you come up with will help you choose a method. For example, open-ended questions work better in an interview or focus group setting than a survey.

Step 4: Collect the data

How you collect market research data will depend entirely on the research method you chose. For example, if you chose a survey, you can use a robust survey tool to distribute and collect your data for later analysis. If you chose an interview, you may have recordings from participants you’ve transcribed for later review.

Step 5: Analyze and present data

Your market research analysis approach should reflect your chosen method.

Quantitative methods like surveys with closed-ended questions can use techniques such as cluster analysis, which separates objects into specific, exclusive groups that are similar. Qualitative methods like interviews call for techniques, such as analytical induction, where you hypothesize and re-hypothesize the reason for events as you learn about similar events.

Whatever analysis technique you use, present your findings in a way that clearly and accurately communicates the takeaways. This could be in the form of simple statements, tables, graphs, slides, etc.

Step 6: Take action

Once you’ve obtained the information you were looking for, take appropriate action. Your actions will depend on your objectives, but here are a few examples of actions you might take:

• Direct your marketing toward a new or different type of customer.
• Highlight a specific benefit or feature of your product in marketing campaigns.
• Change your product or service’s pricing structure.

In step three, we mentioned selecting an appropriate market research method. In the next chapter, we’ll walk through several widely used methods and when they should be used.

Market research methods

When you’ve identified your problem and established your budget, the next step is to choose the appropriate market research method (sometimes referred to as a market research technique).

Whether you’re gathering quantitative or qualitative data, or a mix of the two, the market research methods below are some of the most frequently ones used to gather key information for decision making.

Focus groups

Market research focus groups are widely used to gather qualitative data. With focus groups, you bring together a small selection of people to ask their opinions or gauge their reactions to a stimulus. The people are typically representative of your customers, and the stimulus is usually one of your products. A moderator leads the session.

Mark McElwain, a market research expert with SRAX, says focus groups are a great way to drill down on a specific topic, such as feelings about a new product. His key recommendation for getting the most out of a focus group: Employ a talented moderator.

According to McElwain, the moderator can make or break your focus group. “Extracting insightful answers from participants takes a certain level of finesse. You have to get people to open up and talk at length, and that takes knowing people and being able to read the room. A great moderator can get insights from people in any focus group, whether it’s one about the Oprah Winfrey Network or Mercedes.”

One thing McElwain says to look out for with focus groups is group think — where one participant’s opinions become so overbearing, they influence the opinions of the rest of the participants. “If a moderator can’t maintain control of the room, one participant can wind up directing the conversation and subsequently skew results.”

Interviews

Unlike focus groups, qualitative interviews offer a more individualized approach to gaining customer insights. And while the moderator (or interviewer) is still important here, your market research interview questions are the most important component of a successful interview.

Pay extra attention to ensure your questions align with your objectives, and that they are open-ended to elicit in-depth responses, whether you’re conducting your interview in person or online.

McElwain says interviews are another useful way to go deep regarding a specific topic, but they are also generally more expensive and less scalable than focus groups. “Like any market research method, the interview has benefits and drawbacks. For example, the interviewee may be more open without the presence of other people, but you’re also only getting a single perspective.”

Surveys

Market research surveys tend to be more quantitative in nature, as most questions are closed-ended, requiring a simple yes or no response, or multiple-choice answer. Surveys are great for reaching a wide audience — think hundreds or thousands of people — because they can be done online and anonymously.

Easy-to-use tools like JotForm help you quickly create, distribute, and collect data for all manner of market research surveys.

Direct observation

Observation market research is qualitative and involves directly observing participants using your product in the “real world” or a representative environment. The purpose is to study customer behaviors that naturally occur in certain contexts surrounding your product to better understand customers.

However, McElwain cautions that observation market research has its issues: “The danger is you only have an experiment group, instead of an additional control group. This makes it impossible to compare results as you would with more scientific observation research.”

Field studies

The market research study (or field study) is a qualitative form of research that encompasses a number of methods requiring in-person interaction. For example, observation, focus groups, and interviews can all be considered field studies in some way. One method that departs from these examples is the in-home usage study.

An in-home usage study is most frequently used to test products. Participants use (and typically keep) your product, documenting their usage over a predetermined time period. For example, you may send participants a new dishwashing soap that they are supposed to use daily. Every day, participants respond to a survey that asks questions about their experience, such as how well the soap performed on tough cleaning jobs.

Now that we’ve covered the methods, let’s get strategic. The next chapter goes into the various strategies you can employ with market research.

Market research strategies

You can perform market research in a number of ways.

While the standard methods of surveying and the like are valuable, there are also unique market research strategies you can employ to gain not only information but different perspectives that can further inform your decision making and even prime your more traditional research methods.

Below we describe several less-structured strategies you can try out today.

Industry publications

Following industry publications that relate to your product or service helps you keep a finger on the pulse of your market — trends, competitor happenings, new problems customers are facing, and shifts in customer demand. These publications can also help identify the right questions to ask in a survey or interview as well as questions to ask internally to improve business processes for better customer outcomes.

In many cases, you can also partner with industry publications to access or purchase their list of readers; you can then try to engage with those people using traditional research methods like surveys.

Competitive assessments

When you want to gain insight about your competitors, competitive assessments offer solid learning opportunities. “They help you understand how competing brands are viewed from a customer’s point of view,” explains George Kuhn, president of Drive Research.

Competitive assessments often include a range of activities to gain a full picture of the competitive landscape:

• Research competitors’ websites. Most companies have a collection of white papers, e-books, blogs, brochures, case studies, and other content that showcases their expertise.
• Enlist mystery shoppers to make calls and send emails. Mystery shoppers pose as customers to observe and measure competitors’ customer experiences.
• Conduct customer interviews. Going straight to the source is often the best way to be in the know. In person, such as at a mall, you may need to get permission before asking for customer feedback about a shopping experience, but it can be worthwhile to get this kind of input.

Kuhn shares an example of an apartment developer who wanted to minimize the risk associated with building a new complex — i.e., Will people rent if we build here?

His firm performed a competitive assessment, inventorying the market and conducting mystery shopping calls to get an idea of the number of unoccupied units, typical amenities offered, square footage ranges, etc. His team also performed a market analysis to see where the population was shifting, how much customers were willing to pay, and what they were looking for in a rental community.

Internet market research

As a tried and true strategy, internet market research can answer many of your questions — whether they’re about competitors or customers. However, despite the ease of conducting internet research and the plethora of information that’s available, Kuhn says this strategy can be problematic.

“For one, you have to be careful with your search terms. Even changing a single word in a phrase can produce significantly different search results. More importantly, knowing which sources to trust is a big issue. Just because a site ‘answers’ your question doesn’t mean the answer was accurate,” Kuhn says.

Social media market research

With the rise in online socialization, social media market research has quickly become a viable way to gain information about customer sentiment. Kuhn says there are two main angles to using social media: using your own or competitors’ social accounts to mine insights, and using your social account as a primary research tool.

“Your social media account gives you great data points to learn more about the people who follow you, which should mostly consist of your customers and prospects,” explains Kuhn. This includes demographic data such as age and location. Meanwhile, reviewing both your account and your competitors’ accounts can tell you what type of content people are responding to, as well as what people are saying about that content or the brand that shared it.

Alternatively, you can use your social media account as a vehicle for other research methods, such as surveys. “You can run ads on social platforms. For example, if you’re a brick-and-mortar retailer, you can target surveys to people living close to your store to gauge whether they’re aware of your presence and, if so, why they haven’t visited. You can then use their responses to improve your marketing.”

Strategizing is important, but it’s also important to know what tools are available to conduct market research. Check out JotForm, our easy-to-use form builder for creating and distributing surveys and interview questionnaires, as well as collecting and organizing responses.

More about your market research guides

Annalisa Tammaro

Annalisa Tammaro has over 20 years of market research experience in a variety of industries, with vast knowledge of quantitative and qualitative research methods. Her strengths include management and communication skills, which she combines with her ability to help others draw critical connections between research results and business opportunities.

George Kuhn

George Kuhn is the president of Drive Research, a market research company in upstate New York. He has 15 years of experience in market research managing both qualitative and quantitative research for brands like FedEx, Google, Samsung, T-Mobile, PBS, and Clorox.

Holly Brown

Holly Brown is the president and CEO of Boston Research Services, a full-service market research firm located in Auburn, Massachusetts. She has 20 years of experience helping companies with their market research needs, from providing sample audiences and fielding their surveys to analyzing their data.

Mark McElwain

Mark McElwain has been in the market research space for over 10 years, working for companies such as E-Rewards (Dynata), Nielsen, FocusVision, and now SRAX. With both domestic and international operations experience, Mark brings a depth of knowledge to all manner of market research engagements.

Every month we roundup the best new portfolios released in the previous four weeks. This month we’re looking back at the whole of 2019, and picking out 19 of our favorites from the last 12 months. There’s a mixture here of colorful and restrained, experimental and expected; the one thing they all have in common is an attention to details that creates an exceptional UX. Enjoy!

WTF Studio

If you’re going to name your business WTF Studio, you need a suitably WTF site. Able Parris is a NY-based creative director who’s more than happy to slap you in the face with colour and motion. What we really loved about this site is that once you’ve scrolled past the anarchic introduction, it’s actually very safe, very clear. Attitude doesn’t have to mean sacrificing UX.

Stereo

Stereo features smooth animation, a beautiful palette, and some really gorgeous type. What makes it stand out is the unusual navigation menu — it scrolls across the center of the screen like an old-style marquee. We also loved its sweeping animation as it transitions from state to state.

Eva Garcia

We weren’t just impressed with the portfolios of design agencies this year. Eva Garcia’s portfolio is a classic example of how to build a portfolio site. It’s brand-appropriate, intuitive to use, and lets the work come to the fore.

Kévin Chassagne

Kévin Chassagne’s site is a great example of a site that delivers excellent layout, and awesome animation, without relying on JavaScript. The JavaScript here is used for a few details, but you really lose nothing without it. Everything from the typography, to the colour scheme, to the simple UX are great for a portfolio when you’re potentially browsing hundreds of sites at once.

Nicky Tesla

Nicky Tesla’s portfolio is one of the most original of 2019. It’s a spreadsheet; it doesn’t just look like a spreadsheet, it actually is one; it’s a publicly available spreadsheet on Google, with a domain attached. It’s not the most beautiful portfolio you’ll ever see, but it is daringly committed to its core concept.

Florian Wacker

Florian Wacker’s portfolio features absolutely beautiful typography. This site wowed us back at the start of the year, when minimalism was still de rigueur. As a pitch to design agencies that value good typography, this is almost faultless.

Adam Brandon

More minimalism from the start of 2019 in the form of Adam Brandon’s portfolio. His client list is fairly formidable, with Netflix, Apple, Nike, and Ford in there. The site sensibly takes a step back and lets the work promote itself.

EVOXLAB

Evoxlab is an unusual site for us, in that it has gone out of its way to mimic powerpoint slides, which is bordering on skeuomorphism. Well, kinda. It certainly feels like a slideshow. We’ve included it because it’s really committed to the concept, and in this case it works.

Plug & Play

The agency site for Plug & Play is one of the least challenging sites we’ve seen in 2019. In many ways it verges on cliché, but that’s all intentional, because this site is about a simplified user experience. What’s more we love the way it transitions from dark mode to light, as you scroll.

Athletics

Athletics jumps right into fullscreen video case studies of work for clients like IBM. At that point, if you have the budget, you’re probably sold, but Athletics follows up with a grid of lower-profile, but equally exciting design work.

Revolve Studio

Revolve Studio’s site really stands out not because of the presentation-style user experience, but because it’s built in ASP.NET. It also stands out by not showing any work, which is an unusual approach that has been surprisingly popular over the last year.

Florian Monfrini

Florian Monfrini’s portfolio is an expanded, full screen, collage approach. It fills the space well, and was one of the sites that adopted this approach long before it became fashionable.

Angle2

We love the typography of Angle2. It’s another slideshow-style site, but it’s brought to life by the angles and skew of the typography. Despite the energetic feeling text, and the variety of designs — one per page — it always remains usable.

Florent Biffi

If 2019 was the year of a single effect, it was the year of rippling, liquid-style effects. One of the first we saw was Florent Biffi’s site, with huge, bold typography and a subtle rippling effect over the design.

Bethany Heck

We really loved the semi-brutalist approach of Bethany Heck’s portfolio. It’s just a collection of project titles, and in places the accompanying logos, that lead either to the site being referenced, or to an internal link with delightful typography.

Bold

Bold’s portfolio is a simple presentation with some exceptionally sophisticated details. We loved the way the border expands from the images as you scroll, creating the sense of zooming into a project. It’s a confident and understated portfolio that sells to big names, with big budgets.

Transatlantic Film Orchestra

The Transatlantic Film Orchestra make music for video. Its website opens with calm, dark, monochromatic visuals, and absolutely no auto-play audio, which is exactly the right approach. When we actually chose to play the audio, we loved the UI.

Nick Losacco

Nick Losacco’s site highlights a lot of different skills, not least his typeface design. The whole site relies heavily on bold typography and an acidic red background for its personality.

Versett

Versett’s portfolio is a clean, modern site, that leans towards a one-page approach without ever fully embracing it. It’s easy to scan if you’re a business comparing potential agencies, and we loved the “More+” menu option that herds you towards different options like product design, or launching a new company.

Source

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

PhotoStockEditor: Free HD Images for Commercial Use

UI/UX Design Trends for 2020

Bravo Studio: Free App Builder for Designers

Creative Agency Spends $10,000 on Blank Ads

Neumorphism in User Interfaces

Disney Plus – Quick Wins for a Better Way-finding Experience

After More than 6 Years, IMDb Finally Gets a Redesign

What Happens After Prisoners Learn to Code?

An Ultimate Guide to Movie Poster Design

Choosing the Right Font for your Design

Krabby – Keyboard-Based Navigation Browser Extension

Writing JavaScript with Only Six Characters

The London Underground’s Logo Gets an Inspired Redesign

Our Favorite Typefaces of 2018

Pantone’s Color of the Year is Awful

Your Final_Final Designer Gift Guide of 2019

10 Best Design Podcasts that Inspire in 2020

Creating Outstanding Website Content in 3 Steps

Data-Driven UX with Google Analytics

Web Typography in 2020: What will it Look Like?

Google Design’s Best of 2019

Reimagining Design Systems at Spotify

The 14 Most Important Design Ideas of the Decade, According to the Experts

Important Rules for a UX Team of One

Good Enough Design: How to Boost your Efficiency

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

Source

Is it harder or easier to build a website now than 10 years ago? Has the bar gone up or down? I don’t have any data for you, but I can shell out some loosey-goosey opinions.

HTML

HTML5 was the only big HTML change in the last decade, and it wasn’t particularly dramatic. It’s cool it’s the looser variant (instead of getting XHTML3 or something). More compatible this way. Maybe I’ll close my
and maybe I
won’t. Having better semantic tags (e.g.

I recently did an AMA over on DEV. Just taking the opportunity to port over some answers here like a good indiewebber.

If you were starting out as a front end dev in 2020, what would you say is the first thing you would learn and why?

You need to put yourself in a position where it’s your job to create and take care of a website. Even if that feels like a stretch for you early on. Get the domain, get the website on the public internet. Put your name on it. Now you’ve given yourself stakes, and you’ll learn technology because you must make your ideas come to life.

For me, 650 years ago, that was putting up a website for the ol’ college band. We needed a website! That sounded like fun to me, and I managed to struggle through buying a domain, hosting, and putting up a WordPress website. Then, over time, I learned front-end web technologies because I wanted to change up the design, change up the templates, add cool features, etc.

Get yourself a project and learn through the project.

How do you determine what you want to turn into a blog post and what you leave as a simple Tweet?

I usually won’t avoid the tweet. The tweet is usually a good proving ground for the blog post anyway. If nobody cared, eh, maybe not that good of a post. If it does get good engagement, it’s like the conversation around it is useful in the creation of the blog post. Plus, tweets are so easy to kick out the door. Blog posts, for me, on purpose, have a longer schedule that includes editing and scheduling and such.

Here’s an example tweet. Just a silly little UI experiment. I didn’t feel like waiting to blog about it to drop the demo. But from the Twitter thread, I got some interesting technical feedback, info about what parts people were most suprised by, and some other related ideas. That will, hopefully, lead to a much more robust blog post.

I even treat DEV like that, honestly. I wrote this blog post reaction quickly here, but then refined it for my own blog with some of the feedback.

Do you have a favorite CSS-Trick, where you were just like “wow”?

I think “scroll shadows” in CSS is one of my favorite CSS tricks of all time. It’s originally by Roman Komarov, but explained and improved by Lea Verou. I saw a tool the other day around the idea by Stefan Judis.

It’s a real mind-bender involving four-layered gradient backgrounds, each positioned, sized, and colored differently, and then behaviorally different regarding scrolling.

It’s not just a neat trick because it has real UX implications. Showing a shadow of where you can scroll is important UX. Consider this story of a recent design update in iOS that led to complete confusion around UI actions hidden behind a place you could scroll to, but had zero affordance on how to get there. (Happens to me all the time in Spotify, for the record.)

What would be your top 3 pieces of quick advice for developers trying to follow a similar path to growing their influence and exposure?

I think writing is literally the only way.

I can’t think of a developer with influence who has that influence for anything other than writing. Or if it’s not writing, then it’s a YouTube channel or some other form of creating public stuff.

How much do you see yourself personally playing with Houdini APIs as they are released? Which API are you most excited about (Painting, Layout, Typed OM, …)?

This super-low level stuff sometimes feels over my head. It’s hard for me to picture the industry implications of stuff like this just by looking at specs, ya know?

To me, it seems the Layout API has the most powerful potential.

What I’m imagining right now is that Houdini doesn’t affect normal day-to-day front-end developers like me that much. I won’t be writing much Houdini code. But I’ll use fancy things that other people create, because it does something useful for me. Just like most people don’t write their own libraries or have published npm packages — they just use them.

It’s fun to be wow’d by Houdini. If anyone is looking for that, make sure to look at Vincent De Oliveira’s showcase website.

What is your favorite thing about working at CodePen and/or CSS-Tricks?

You know what I really like? I like getting into the office every day and having a pretty decent amount of freedom of what I’m going to do that day. I’ll probably have meetings. I’ll probably have some stuff on the ol’ calendar. I’ll probably have some team expectations I’m trying to meet. But I also usually have plenty of time to pursue things that are interesting to me at the moment.

Sometimes I’m in the moment to drill through some emails. Sometimes I want to tinker with some demo that sounds like fun. Sometimes I want to write up a thought or record a video. Sometimes I want to plan something out or document something. Sometimes I want to talk something out with other people or do some pair programming.

I’m fortunate that I’m the boss (lol) and I put myself in that position on purpose so I have that freedom.

What is something that you wish we could add in CSS?

I feel like every time someone asks this we all should take every opportunity to scream Container Queries! until we get them.

The idea is that we should be able to write CSS that says, “When this element is this wide, this CSS should take effect.” And not just width, but whatever media queries we have at the page level already.

The best demo of a use case out there is Philip Walton’s page.

I want to write a card component that shuffles itself around based on how wide it is, not how wide the page is, because there isn’t always a direct connection between those two things (e.g. a card component can show up in a narrow sidebar on a large screen, but be full-width on a tablet or something).

Every component can be in a situation like that, so for the love of CSS, let me write media queries scoped to those components. I echo a lot of other people when I saw that if we had this, the vast majority of media queries we write would be these, not page-level.

Do you think it’s worth suggesting a { position: above-fold; }?

I’m not sure I’ve ever made a big fold-based decision once in my career. Not a big fan of that thinking. THERE IS A LINE IN WHICH THIS IMPORTANT MODULE MUST NOT CROSS, haha. Prioritizing the most important stuff to be higher up the page, sure. Websites don’t fold like newspapers.

Plus, we’ve got viewport units now, so if you absolutely need to position something in the top visible viewport area, you can.

Since you’ve been writing blog posts for so long, have you developed a process for writing one?

Sorta! It still feels pretty casual to me (let’s call my writing medium quality), so it’s not like I’m renting a cabin in the wilderness and finding inspiration in the sunsets and cheap whiskey.

• I write down every blog post idea that comes to me. I try to keep that list fairly public but I also have a personal list where I can be even sloppier.
• I put as much context into those lists as I can, so I can hope to summon up the same emotion that made me write it down in the first place. If I revisit the idea a week later and can’t, it’s probably not a very good idea.
• I write up the post with as much context as I can. Light research is typically involved.
• We have a lead editor on CSS-Tricks, so it’s reviewed by at least one person before being scheduled.

CSS or CSS-in-JS?

I see a ton of cool stuff happening in CSS-in-JS. I think it solves a lot of interesting problems for certain websites. For example, I very much like the idea of having the option to write styles that are scoped to a component programmatically, and thus are tree-shaken when the component isn’t used automatically.

But the web is a big place, and dare I say most websites aren’t built with JavaScript-powered component models. Thus, CSS-in-JS isn’t necessary or appropriate for a lot of sites.

Although, two things to be clear:

• You can’t have CSS-in-JS without CSS. CSS-in-JS is still styles that are applied to elements. It doesn’t absolve you from learning CSS.
• The CSS-in-JS landscape is wide. It’s a little hard to talk about so vaguely. Each project in the bucket of CSS-in-JS handles things a bit differently and how the styles are applied to the site is even quite wide. I think it sometimes gets lost in the arguments that some of the approaches literally make a CSS stylesheet that you link up like you would any other CSS — even Sass-produced CSS — which there doesn’t seem to be much argument about anymore.

The post Clips from my DEV AMA appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

This seemingly simple task had me scratching my head for a few hours while I was working on my website. As it turns out, getting the current page URL in Gatsby is not as straightforward as you may think, but also not so complicated to understand.

Let’s look at a few methods of making it happen. But first, you might be wondering why on earth we’d even want to do something like this.

Why you might need the current URL

So before we get into the how, let’s first answer the bigger question: Why would you want to get the URL of the current page? I can offer a few use cases.

Meta tags

The first obvious thing that you’d want the current URL for is meta tags in the document head:

<link rel="canonical" href={url} />
<meta property="og:url" content={url} />

Social Sharing

I’ve seen it on multiple websites where a link to the current page is displayed next to sharing buttons. Something like this (found on Creative Market)

Styling

This one is less obvious but I’ve used it a few times with styled-components. You can render different styles based on certain conditions. One of those conditions can be a page path (i.e. part of the URL after the name of the site). Here’s a quick example:

import React from 'react';
import styled from 'styled-components';

const Layout = ({ path, children }) => (
  <StyledLayout path={path}>
    {children}
  </StyledLayout>
);
    
const StyledLayout = styled.main`
  background-color: ${({ path }) => (path === '/' ? '#fff' : '#000')};
`;

export default Layout;

Here, I’ve created a styled Layout component that, based on the path, has a different background color.

This list of examples only illustrates the idea and is by no means comprehensive. I’m sure there are more cases where you might want to get the current page URL. So how do we get it?

Understand build time vs. runtime

Not so fast! Before we get to the actual methods and code snippets, I’d like to make one last stop and briefly explain a few core concepts of Gatsby.

The first thing that we need to understand is that Gatsby, among many other things, is a static site generator. That means it creates static files (that are usually HTML and JavaScript). There is no server and no database on the production website. All pieces of information (including the current page URL) must be pulled from other sources or generated during build time or runtime before inserting it into the markup.

That leads us to the second important concept we need to understand: Build time vs. runtime. I encourage you to read the official Gatsby documentation about it, but here’s my interpretation.

Runtime is when one of the static pages is opened in the browser. In that case, the page has access to all the wonderful browser APIs, including the Window API that, among many other things, contains the current page URL.

One thing that is easy to confuse, especially when starting out with Gatsby, is that running gatsby develop in the terminal in development mode spins up the browser for you. That means all references to the window object work and don’t trigger any errors.

Build time happens when you are done developing and tell Gatsby to generate final optimized assets using the gatsby build command. During build time, the browser doesn’t exist. This means you can’t use the window object.

Here comes the a-ha! moment. If builds are isolated from the browser, and there is no server or database where we can get the URL, how is Gatsby supposed to know what domain name is being used? That’s the thing — it can’t! You can get the slug or path of the page, but you simply can’t tell what the base URL is. You have to specify it.

This is a very basic concept, but if you are coming in fresh with years of WordPress experience, it can take some time for this info to sink in. You know that Gatsby is serverless and all but moments like this make you realize: There is no server.

Now that we have that sorted out, let’s jump to the actual methods for getting the URL of the current page.

Method 1: Use the href property of the window.location object

This first method is not specific to Gatsby and can be used in pretty much any JavaScript application in the browser. See, browser is the key word here.

Let’s say you are building one of those sharing components with an input field that must contain the URL of the current page. Here’s how you might do that:

import React from 'react';

const Foo = () => {
  const url = typeof window !== 'undefined' ? window.location.href : '';

  return (
    <input type="text" readOnly="readonly" value={url} />
  );
};

export default Foo;

If the window object exists, we get the href property of the location object that is a child of the window. If not, we give the url variable an empty string value.

If we do it without the check and write it like this:

const url = window.location.href;

…the build will fail with an error that looks something like this:

failed Building static HTML for pages - 2.431s
ERROR #95312 
"window" is not available during server-side rendering.

As I mentioned earlier, this happens because the browser doesn’t exist during the build time. That’s a huge disadvantage of this method. You can’t use it if you need the URL to be present on the static version of the page.

But there is a big advantage as well! You can access the window object from a component that is nested deep inside other components. In other words, you don’t have to drill the URL prop from parent components.

Method 2: Get the href property of location data from props

Every page and template component in Gatsby has a location prop that contains information about the current page. However, unlike window.location, this prop is present on all pages.

Quoting Gatsby docs:

The great thing is you can expect the location prop to be available to you on every page.

But there may be a catch here. If you are new to Gatsby, you’ll log that prop to the console, and notice that it looks pretty much identical to the window.location (but it’s not the same thing) and also contains the href attribute. How is this possible? Well, it is not. The href prop is only there during runtime.

The worst thing about this is that using location.href directly without first checking if it exists won’t trigger an error during build time.

All this means that we can rely on the location prop to be on every page, but can’t expect it to have the href property during build time. Be aware of that, and don’t use this method for critical cases where you need the URL to be in the markup on the static version of the page.

So let’s rewrite the previous example using this method:

import React from 'react';

const Page = ({ location }) => {
  const url = location.href ? location.href : '';

  return (
    <input type="text" readOnly="readonly" value={url} />
  );
};

export default Page;

This has to be a top-level page or template component. You can’t just import it anywhere and expect it work. location prop will be undefined.

As you can see, this method is pretty similar to the previous one. Use it for cases where the URL is needed only during runtime.

But what if you need to have a full URL in the markup of a static page? Let’s move on to the third method.

Method 3: Generate the current page URL with the pathname property from location data

As we discussed at the start of this post, if you need to include the full URL to the static pages, you have to specify the base URL for the website somewhere and somehow get it during build time. I’ll show you how to do that.

As an example, I’ll create a tag in the header. It is important to have the full page URL in it before the page hits the browser. Otherwise, search engines and site scrapers will see the empty href attribute, which is unacceptable.

Here’s the plan:

1. Add the siteURL property to siteMetadata in gatsby-config.js.
2. Create a static query hook to retrieve siteMetadata in any component.
3. Use that hook to get siteURL.
4. Combine it with the path of the page and add it to the markup.

Let’s break each step down.

Add the siteURL property to siteMetadata in gatsby-config.js

Gatsby has a configuration file called gatsby-config.js that can be used to store global information about the site inside siteMetadata object. That works for us, so we’ll add siteURL to that object:

module.exports = {
  siteMetadata: {
    title: 'Dmitry Mayorov',
    description: 'Dmitry is a front-end developer who builds cool sites.',
    author: '@dmtrmrv',
    siteURL: 'https://dmtrmrv.com',
  }
};

Create a static query hook to retrieve siteMetadata in any component

Next, we need a way to use siteMetadata in our components. Luckily, Gatsby has a StaticQuery API that allows us to do just that. You can use the useStaticQuery hook directly inside your components, but I prefer to create a separate file for each static query I use on the website. This makes the code easier to read.

To do that, create a file called use-site-metadata.js inside a hooks folder inside the src folder of your site and copy and paste the following code to it.

import { useStaticQuery, graphql } from 'gatsby';

const useSiteMetadata = () => {
  const { site } = useStaticQuery(
  graphql`
    query {
    site {
      siteMetadata {
      title
      description
      author
      siteURL
      }
    }
    }
  `,
  );
  return site.siteMetadata;
};

export default useSiteMetadata;

Make sure to check that all properties — like title, description, author, and any other properties you have in the siteMetadata object — appear in the GraphQL query.

Use that hook to get siteURL

Here’s the fun part: We get the site URL and use it inside the component.

import React from 'react';
import Helmet from 'react-helmet';
import useSiteMetadata from '../hooks/use-site-metadata';

const Page = ({ location }) => {
  const { siteURL } = useSiteMetadata();
  return (
    <Helmet>
      <link rel="canonical" href={`${siteURL}${location.pathname}`} />
    </Helmet>
  );
};

export default Page;

Let’s break it down.

On Line 3, we import the useSiteMetadata hook we created into the component.

import useSiteMetadata from '../hooks/use-site-metadata';

Then, on Line 6, we destructure the data that comes from it, creating the siteURL variable. Now we have the site URL that is available for us during build and runtime. Sweet!

const { siteURL } = useSiteMetadata();

Combine the site URL with the path of the page and add it to the markup

Now, remember the location prop from the second method? The great thing about it is that it contains the pathname property during both build and runtime. See where it’s going? All we have to do is combine the two:

`${siteURL}${location.pathname}`

This is probably the most robust solution that will work in the browsers and during production builds. I personally use this method the most.

I’m using React Helmet in this example. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a tool for rendering the head section in React applications. Darrell Hoffman wrote up a nice explanation of it here on CSS-Tricks.

Method 4: Generate the current page URL on the server side

What?! Did you just say server? Isn’t Gatsby a static site generator? Yes, I did say server. But it’s not a server in the traditional sense.

As we already know, Gatsby generates (i.e. server renders) static pages during build time. That’s where the name comes from. What’s great about that is that we can hook into that process using multiple APIs that Gatsby already provides.

The API that interests us the most is called onRenderBody. Most of the time, it is used to inject custom scripts and styles to the page. But what’s exciting about this (and other server-side APIs) is that it has a pathname parameter. This means we can generate the current page URL “on the server.”

I wouldn’t personally use this method to add meta tags to the head section because the third method we looked at is more suitable for that. But for the sake of example, let me show you how you could add the canonical link to the site using onRenderBody.

To use any server-side API, you need to write the code in a file called gatsby-ssr.js that is located in the root folder of your site. To add the link to the head section, you would write something like this:

const React = require('react');
const config = require('./gatsby-config');

exports.onRenderBody = ({ pathname, setHeadComponents }) => {
  setHeadComponents([
    <link rel="canonical" href={`${config.siteMetadata.siteURL}${pathname}`} />,
  ]);
};

Let’s break this code bit by bit.

We require React on Line 1. It is necessary to make the JSX syntax work. Then, on Line 2, we pull data from the gatsby-config.js file into a config variable.

Next, we call the setHeadComponents method inside onRenderBody and pass it an array of components to add to the site header. In our case, it’s just one link tag. And for the href attribute of the link itself, we combine the siteURL and the pathname:

`${config.siteMetadata.siteURL}${pathname}`

Like I said earlier, this is probably not the go-to method for adding tags to the head section, but it is good to know that Gatsby has server-side APIs that make it possible to generate a URL for any given page during the server rendering stage.

If you want to learn more about server-side rendering with Gatsby, I encourage you to read their official documentation.

That’s it!

As you can see, getting the URL of the current page in Gatsby is not very complicated, especially once you understand the core concepts and know the tools that are available to use. If you know other methods, please let me know in the comments!

Resources

• JavaScript Window Interface
• Overview of the Gatsby Build Process
• Location Data from Props
• Gatsby Server Rendering APIs
• React Helmet

The post How to the Get Current Page URL in Gatsby appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

GraphQL has all kinds of awesome tooling built around it. But like everything on the web, it ultimately comes down to data shootin’ across the ol’ network and responses coming back. If you need to talk to a GraphQL API endpoint, you don’t absolutely have to use some kind of framework or library to make requests against it. As a matter of fact, you can do it pretty cleanly in vanilla JavaScript.

Take the Pokémon API, available in GraphQL, which I found via this list of APIs. It has a GraphiQL interface for exploring.

From that page, you can execute queries and see the results. You can also poke into the Network tab in DevTools and see the payload for requests it sends off, and see that it’s just a bit of JSON that is POSTed.

We can make our own JSON in that format too! First, we’ll make it an object in the right format, utilizing template literals to make the GraphQL query look nice (which is actually required because the query syntax is dependent on white-space). Then we JSON-ify it with the native JavaScript API and POST it via the also-native fetch API.

See the Pen
Raw GraphQL by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier)
on CodePen.

Easy cheesy. And no fancy tooling to request exactly what you need, which is the core benefit of GraphQL.

The post Raw GraphQL Querying appeared first on CSS-Tricks.