Become a better UI designer with Tailwind — intentionally or accidentally
You’re a developer tasked with converting visual designs to HTML and CSS.
You’re a confident developer already familiar with Tailwind CSS, but you don’t necessarily perceive yourself as having a “good eye for design”.
You want to improve the quality and fidelity of your design implementations — getting as close as possible to “pixel perfect” conversions.
If you see yourself in this description… this workshop is definitely for you!
This workshop is intended for developers who are already familiar with Tailwind CSS.
If you’re not, great free resources to quickly up-skill are the official Tailwind docs and YouTube channel. The From Zero to Production video series in particular is a great introduction to Tailwind, even if designed for Tailwind v2.
Basic familiarity with JavaScript and React is also beneficial, since we’ll be using a React + Vite app to build our UI.
Again, not critical as the workshops stays firmly focused on CSS.
All of these must be available in your PATH. To verify things are set up
properly, you can run this:
git --version
node --version
npm --versionIf you have trouble with any of these, learn more about the PATH environment variable and how to fix it here for windows or mac/linux.
We'll be implementing a design from a Figma file, and it's critical to have the ability to "inspect" the design in Figma.
Without an account, you can only "see" the design, but not get any measurements and info when hovering over layers.
Create a free account, and make sure you can see the side panel and click on things to inspect them.
This is a pretty large project (it's actually many apps in one) so it can take several minutes to get everything set up the first time. Please have a strong network connection before running the setup and grab a snack.
Warning: This repo is very large. Make sure you have a good internet connection before you start the setup process. The instructions below use
--depthto limit the amount you download, but if you have a slow connection, or you pay for bandwidth, you may want to find a place with a better connection.
Follow these steps to get this set up:
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/epicweb-dev/pixel-perfect-tailwind.git
cd pixel-perfect-tailwind
npm run setupIf you experience errors here, please open an issue with as many details as you can offer.
You'll find all the exercises in the exercises directory. The structure of the
workshop apps is described below, but most of the time you should be able to
simply run the app and navigate around the different exercises using the
application (there are even buttons to open the right exercise file right in
your editor).
The purpose of the exercise is not for you to work through all the material. It's intended to get your brain thinking about the right questions to ask me as I walk through the material.
The application has several buttons which will launch your editor to the right file. There are a lot of files in this workshop so you'll be using this feature a lot to get to the right place at the right time.
This should just work™️ (it looks at your currently running processes and
chooses the editor based on that). If it doesn't guess correctly, create a
.env file in the root of this project and add an environment variable called
KCDSHOP_EDITOR with the value being set to the path to your editor's
executable. For example, if you're using VS Code on Windows, you'd add this to
your .env file:
KCDSHOP_EDITOR='"C:\Program Files\Microsoft VS Code\bin\code.cmd"'
Make certain that if the path includes spaces that you wrap the path in quotes as above (note the use of single quotes wrapping the double quotes!).
The value of KCDSHOP_EDITOR should be the command that you would run in your
terminal to open your editor from the command line. This means, the first thing
should be the path to the executable for your editor (or the command if you have
one in your PATH). So you may be able to get away with doing something as
simple as this:
KCDSHOP_EDITOR=code
exercises/*.*/README.md: Exercise background informationexercises/*.*/*.problem.*/README.*.md: Problem Instructionsexercises/*.*/*.problem.*/*.tsx: Exercise with Emoji helpers 👈 You spend most of your time here.exercises/*.*/*.solution.*/*.tsx: Solved version
The purpose of the exercise is not for you to work through all the material. It's intended to get your brain thinking about the right questions to ask me as I walk through the material.
Each exercise has comments in it to help you get through the exercise. These fun emoji characters are here to help you.
- Kody the Koala 🐨 will tell you when there's something specific you should do
- Lily the Life Jacket 🦺 will help you with any TypeScript-specific parts of the exercises
- Marty the Money Bag 💰 will give you specific tips (and sometimes code) along the way
- Nancy the Notepad 📝 will encourage you to take notes on what you're learning
- Olivia the Owl 🦉 will give you useful tidbits/best practice notes
- Dominic the Document 📜 will give you links to useful documentation
- Barry the Bomb 💣 will be hanging around anywhere you need to blow stuff up (delete code)
- Matthew the Muscle 💪 will indicate that you're working with an exercise
- Chuck the Checkered Flag 🏁 will indicate that you're working with a final
- Peter the Product Manager 👨💼 helps us know what our users want
- Alfred the Alert 🚨 will occasionally show up in the test failures with potential explanations for why the tests are failing
- Kellie the Co-worker 🧝♀️ your co-worker who sometimes does work ahead of your exercises
Each exercise has an Elaboration and Feedback link. Please fill that out after the exercise and instruction.
At the end of the workshop, please go to this URL to give overall feedback. Thank you!