Hey, I’m Nils.
I’m a Frontend Designer at 9elements and I love HTML & CSS. Sometimes I write or talk about these things.

Stuff I wrote.

Create Diagonal Layouts Like It's 2020

Layouts with diagonal sections are quite popular for several years now. It is not the new hot stuff, and you will probably not find it in the articles titled "Design trends for 2020". But I think it is here to stay. It is one tool designers can use to bring some dynamic to all the rectangular boxes with boring 90-degree angles.

Gradient angles in CSS, Figma & Sketch

Do you know the feeling when a subject never lets you go? In the last years, I have worked with different graphics programs and have written many lines of CSS. Even though it is now easy to copy CSS code for gradients directly from e.g. Figma, I always had the feeling that gradients in graphics programs behave somewhat differently than gradients created with CSS. Especially the angle of a gradient sometimes seemed more like a random product to me. In the end, copying the CSS code often leads to subtle, but intolerable differences in the design.

How to create a logo that responds to its own aspect ratio

There are quite a few articles on the web that deal with responsive logos. The most popular example might be the Responsive Logos website that shows some very well known logos in different variations for different screen sizes. When I first saw this example, I thought it wasn’t much more than a little gimmick. In the end, it is just <div> with a big image sprite as background.

Some of my Talks

How Studying History Of Arts Helped Me Become A Better Frontend Designer

You may think, art history and frontend development do not have much in common. Well, you may be surprised. Some of the problems we have to deal with today were discussed in art history long before the invention of the Internet. Also, the skills needed to analyze a piece of art correctly show significant similarity to the capabilities required to implement modern layouts with CSS. This talk will show you how to analyze a static layout by looking beyond pixels. Instead, you will understand why a given design works the way it does and translate this to modern CSS.

Everything you never wanted to know about CSS Background

If you learn CSS today, there are a lot of properties that are quite new and exciting. Talking about CSS-grid, blend-mode, custom-properties ... etc. But already for many years, there is the property called background. And I think it's pretty underrated. So I would like to show you what the not-so-familiar possibilities are that this seemingly simple property has to offer.

Size does matter

Ever since Ethan Marcotte coined the term Responsive Web Design in 2010, we've been working hard to make websites look good on our smartphones' small screens - but what about large monitors? Unfortunately, these still fall by the wayside in most design phases. The result is narrow content areas on huge screens. To get around this problem, Nils shows ways to make fonts and elements look good on large devices using relative scaling factors.