knife

Nail vertical rhythm, modular scale, and REMs like a boss with this simple set of SASS/SCSS variables, functions and mixins.

NB: early release, expect this to change, I'll do my best not to break stuff, and let you know if something will break in the future..

Features

Simple to master and Use
Responsive friendly
Work / think in px - win in REMs
Optional IE Support
Designed to be compatible with Grid Lover
Solves sub pixel rounding errors in different browsers by rounding out your base numbers.

Install

Of course, first make sure you have SASS installed.

then install with bower :

$ bower install knife

or : Download and simply include the knife.sass file in your sass directory and place the following at the top of your main sass / scss stylesheet to import it.

@import 'knife';

Usage

Note that this tool is heavily inspired by the fantatstic web app Grid Lover and its absolutely one of the eaiest ways to sort out these initial variables.

Set your basic variables

// Basic Type Variabless
$body-font-size: 	16px;
$body-line-height: 	1.5;
$scale-factor: 		1.333;
$ie8compatability:  true;

Set Your base font size on the html ans body

html { @include khtml(); }
body { @include kbody(); }

This can be done in your base or normalization files, or later on before you define youe type. You should be defining your typography straight after your normalize / reset.

Set up your Typography

h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {text-transform: uppercase;}
h1 { @include ktype(5, 1, 1); }
h2 { @include ktype(4, 1, 1); }
h3 { @include ktype(3, 1, 1); }
h4 { @include ktype(2, 1, 1); }
h5 { @include ktype(1, 1, 0); }
h6 { 
@include ktype(0, 1, 0);
	font-weight: normal;
	text-transform: capitalize;
}
p, ul, ol {@include ktype(0,0,1);}
small { @include ktype(-1,0,1); }

Use the krem() mixin to set any other value in rems, because no one really spends their life thinking in relative units of measure.

@include krem("height", 160px);

Output :

note the bloat added by the IE compatability, obviously setting that to false will result in halving the output. Have a look at the basic demo in the example folder for more information.

/* Type Setup */
html {
  font-size: 16px;
  line-height: 24px; }

body {
  font-size: 16px;
  line-height: 24px;
  font-size: 1rem;
  line-height: 1.5rem; }

/* Typography */
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
  text-transform: uppercase; }

h1 {
  font-size: 68px;
  font-size: 4.25rem;
  line-height: 72px;
  line-height: 4.5rem;
  margin-top: 48px;
  margin-top: 3rem;
  margin-bottom: 24px;
  margin-bottom: 1.5rem; }

h2 {
  font-size: 51px;
  font-size: 3.1875rem;
  line-height: 72px;
  line-height: 4.5rem;
  margin-top: 24px;
  margin-top: 1.5rem;
  margin-bottom: 24px;
  margin-bottom: 1.5rem; }

h3 {
  font-size: 38px;
  font-size: 2.375rem;
  line-height: 48px;
  line-height: 3rem;
  margin-top: 24px;
  margin-top: 1.5rem;
  margin-bottom: 24px;
  margin-bottom: 1.5rem; }

h4 {
  font-size: 29px;
  font-size: 1.8125rem;
  line-height: 48px;
  line-height: 3rem;
  margin-top: 24px;
  margin-top: 1.5rem;
  margin-bottom: 24px;
  margin-bottom: 1.5rem; }

h5 {
  font-size: 22px;
  font-size: 1.375rem;
  line-height: 24px;
  line-height: 1.5rem;
  margin-top: 24px;
  margin-top: 1.5rem;
  margin-bottom: 0px;
  margin-bottom: 0rem; }

h6 {
  font-size: 16px;
  font-size: 1rem;
  line-height: 24px;
  line-height: 1.5rem;
  margin-top: 24px;
  margin-top: 1.5rem;
  margin-bottom: 0px;
  margin-bottom: 0rem;
  text-transform: capitalize; }

p, ul, ol, dl {
  font-size: 16px;
  font-size: 1rem;
  line-height: 24px;
  line-height: 1.5rem;
  margin-top: 0px;
  margin-top: 0rem;
  margin-bottom: 24px;
  margin-bottom: 1.5rem; }

small {
  display: inline-block;
  font-size: 13px;
  font-size: 0.8125rem;
  line-height: 24px;
  line-height: 1.5rem;
  margin-top: 0px;
  margin-top: 0rem;
  margin-bottom: 0px;
  margin-bottom: 0rem; }

About

Typography is an essential art for web and application development, a lot of the internet is essentailly slightly interactive documents, and its there imperative that we achieve strong vertical layouts and a clear visual heirachy to our content.

Knife is essentially a small collections of mixins leveraging good typographic principals to make setting up strong typographic layouts reasonably quick, easy and intuitive. Right now knife is not seeking to solve every problem or individual instance, but is there to help you get going quickly, and have a great typographic foundation in your SCSS.

Project Goals

Make vertical rhythm, modular scale and rem units easy to implement and use.
Maintain and develop a small inuitive API for typography in scss
Switchable support for old browsers.
Stimulate the conversation about good web typography between developers and designers.

Acknowledgements & Inspiration

heavily inspired by the awesome web app Grid Lover and sevenupcan's sass gridlover mixin. I've been further pushed to develop this little SASS tool to help "onboard" team members with typographic layout principals, using REM units, speeding up starting dev time on projects and make something without a steep learning curve. I hope you find it useful too.

About Web Typography

Tools for Better Type

TODO :

add shift property to ktype
~~Implement tests~~
Start thinking about a much stronger API for v1.0
- better naming convention for variables
- More Flexibility
Consider SASS Maps for handling properties better or changing propoerties for different sections.
~~Handle old global variable warning nonsense~~
finish type template mixin
- a super quick single mixin for mocking up pages.
- Should have sensible defaults
- should accept a map of properties
~~handle unitless values~~
handle multiple values for padding / margin etc
Finish Wiki
Create awesome examples
~~Finish killer logo~~ created by the awesome designer Sol Witcher
Make sick as f@!% Landing Page
~~Finish resolve mixin~~
~~add reduce to kbody~~
~~add reduce to khtnl~~
~~Add sache~~
~~Add bower support~~
~~finish push, pull~~
~~suffix and prefix~~
~~start type template mixin~~
~~add 'offset' to accomodate border etc.~~
~~Add basic Example~~
~~add basic github page~~

License

MIT Licensed , Paul van Zyl 2014

Contributors

Please Feel free to make pull requests or suggest features, this project is super new and still growing into itself, I generally create feat/something branches for specific features, but will create a seperate development branch for contributors to make pull requests against.

erichuffman/knife