Project 03, Part II: Sprite Sheets: Bravura London Registration Page

Continuing with my project on Bravura London's registration page, I wanted to talk a little about sprite sheets, and what I think I now know about them. Code-wise, this is something I struggled to wrap my head around. Coming from a gaming background, I think I have a pretty clear grasp of a sprite sheet's functionality and how they can be used.

A sprite sheet is essentially a composite of several different images, all combined into one single image. Within your code, you can specify which co-ordinates from the whole image are rendered. You may only wish to render a portion of the image. It's case dependant, but for performance, it can be quicker to only load in a single image and selectively display each of these sprites, as opposed to loading lots of smaller images.

The sprite sheets displayed on Bravura are the social media icons and the tiling background. As you can see from the social media icons, this image is a list of 11 different images all combined into one atlas. You wouldn't want to draw this whole image as it is because you may not have a social media page for all of these outlets, so you define which pixels are shown, making them individual entities. The trick here, to make it simpler for you to code, is to have all the images evenly spaced within the same height:width ratio. We're talking 22px by 22px for the icons in this instance, meaning if I want to call the third image in, I will need to step along 44px and render from that point onward.

Firstly, if we look at the HTML, I've made an unordered list containing 5 list items, one for each of the social media outlets we wish to link to. Notice how, even though I want to render images, there is no <img> tag here, that is strictly handled by the CSS in this instance. So, I've created 5 list items, each containing an <a> tag to link us to another website.

The CSS of the spritesheet will draw the image of the social media icons and we have to define which specific pixels the CSS should draw for each icon. There are 3 simple inputs for defining a spite:

    left: 0px;
    width: 22px;
    background: url('http://') 0 0;

As we're rendering a 2D image, we draw along two axis; x-axis (left-right) and the y-axis (up-down). Meaning our first CSS input (left: 0px) depends on where we wish the sprite to start drawing from. If we're drawing the first image, we'll start from 0px, then jump along in increments for every subsequent sprite.

The next input (width: 22px;) defines how wide the image is, and where we wish to stop drawing from. In this instance, all sprites are 22px wide, so this value will remain the same. This is recommended, as it makes the mathematics a lot easier to work out.

Finally, we have (background: url('http://') 0 0;), this defines the image you wish to render, and its position for left and top.

This CSS needs to be set for each sprite you wish to render, in my case, I will have 5 blocks of code each synced to a different HTML class.

To read more about using sprite-sheets, use the W3Schools CSS Image Sprites. To view the full HTML and CSS from this project, see my previous post: Project 03, Part I: Fonts: Bravura London Registration Page.

Project 03, Part I: Fonts: Bravura London Registration Page

After being on, what I guess we'd refer to, a hiatus due to err... personal, emotional... entanglement (?) I've been out of the HTML game for some time. Like 4 weeks tops. But that's a lot of time to forget things. I feel super behind right now, but I also finally feel ready to get straight back on that horse.

Before it all kicked off, I'd started a project to recreate the registration page on Bravura London's online store. I like this site, it's clean, accessible and it has a kicking colour palette. I also wanted to attempt a project that included forms, after publishing Project 02: Forms & Buttons, putting practise into more practise. 

Top: Original, Bottom: Recreate

As usual, there are ever-so-slight differences between the original and my rendition. Mostly to do with positioning. That is something I just can't seem to put to bed. As for styling, in terms of adding custom fonts, matching the tables and buttons, creating spritesheets I'd say that all went rather well indeed.

Adding A Custom Font

As I'm sure we're all aware, there are a select number of font families that are deemed web safe (Read more on W3Schools CSS Web Safe Fonts). These are fonts that can typically be read by any browser, on any computer as they should be installed by default. We're talking your serif, your sans serif, your monospace here. 

Within these generic families are a selection of generic typefaces for when you need to specify a particular style. The typefaces within each family generally won't have much variation, once again, they're a selection of big hitters that should be available to most browsers and computers. For example, Times and Georgia would fall within the serif family. But what if you call Georgia and the user doesn't have it installed? Well, you can use a fallback that the browser can refer to if the desired typeface isn't available.

In CSS you would call:

{
    font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
}

Calling font-family, you guessed it, refers to you wanting to change the typeface that is displayed. In this case we're going with Times New Roman. If you want to call a specific typeface, you will always need to do so within quotation marks ("), this is generally to avoid errors with spaces and punctuation. Times is a generic typeface, there are no quotes here because it is a single word and should come pre-installed. If the user does not have Times New Roman available to them, the browser will render Times instead. Finally, if you don't have Times, well, you fallback on serif. All these fonts are serif fonts and therefore, there should not be much visual discrepancy between what you see and what the user sees if they don't have all fonts available. 

The rendering order is from left-to-right. If the user does not have the font that is being called, the browser will try the next one in the list. 

We all know the classics; Times New Roman, Arial, etc. but there are thousands upon thousands of custom fonts out there, below the radar, waiting to be rendered. The two custom fonts used within the Bravura site are Lato and Dosis. Never heard or them? Nor I. Your browser won't have heard of them either, so you'll have to tell it where to find them. This is done within the <head> section of your HTML sheet. 

Thankfully, both these fonts can be found within Google Fonts. This is an archive of elegantly designed open source typography. Google Fonts will also provide you with the characters and the weights for you to easily copy-paste into your code. 

In HTML, my <head> code now looks a little like this:

Just like loading in a CSS stylesheet, we are loading in the data for our typefaces, including the font weights we need to use. As Google Fonts set everything up nicely for us, we just have to refer to the correct location in the href and the call the typeface within our CSS document. 

This is a very friendly and free way of using custom fonts to improve the design of your site. Be weary that users still may not be able to download these custom fonts, so have comfortable fallback fonts that still render to the desired effect. 

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As per usual, the accompanying code. I got all fancy this time and called my stylesheet as a separate file, so if you wish to view it correctly, please check the file names. 

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