Sparkbox Foundry Articles

Thinking about taking on a just-for-fun side project? You should. Ethan tells you how building High Fives, his latest hack project, helped him get out of his comfort zone and take some design and development risks.

Building accessible websites can be super daunting. Ethan walks you through the WCAG standard and how to use it to put people first.

Ethan talks about the benefits of using screencasts to communicate with your teammates.

Ethan walks you through HSL color notation, then gets funky with color functions.

How making video games made Ethan a better developer.

Good comments make for good collaboration. Ethan talks about what makes CSS comments beautiful, and how you can up your commenting game to score more birthday cards.

There's a whole lot of grid systems to choose from. Ethan talks about what kinds of grid systems are out there and whether or not you even need one in the first place.

A post in which Ethan reassures you that gzip isn't scary, and reminds you to prove junk you say.

Writing all the markup and styles from the ground up for multiple brands wastes your time upfront and makes future changes even more cumbersome. Ethan has a Sassy solution to save your time and sanity.

Limit gross refactoring tomorrow by picking class names that are less likely to change. Ethan shares three naming options to help cushion the blow of future design changes.

Building a site can make you feel like a magician. Ethan shares a testing trick that will leave your crowds applauding.

Vim multi-file searches don't have to make you twitchy. Ethan has tips to make you search confidently.

We love to improve, and we're pretty obsessed with continually improving our build process. Rob and Ethan explain how we built the templates for Lenovo (Australia) using SMACSS techniques.

How do you manage lots and lots of different media queries while cashing in on the benefit of named breakpoints? Ethan breaks it all down with the help of bear jokes.

People still use old browsers. This doesn’t mean we can’t use modern browser features. Ethan explains how we can use them responsibly.

Almost all of our projects have an element of HTML/CSS/JS templating. The pursuit of a better project starting point is never-ending, and we feel we've taken a big step forward during the Sparkbox web rebuild.

Love to flex your Vim muscles? Hate the copy, paste, repeat game when writing markup? Ethan has some time-saving exercises for you.