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Basekick

An experimental mixin for realigning your typographic elements with proper graphic design baseline. The intent is to make it much easier to compose pages while maintaining your vertical rhythm.

Background

In CSS, the text in a given element will sit centered within its own line-height. In the design world the line height is measured from the baseline of the text. As a result our UIs often deviate from the designers intentions, requiring a heap of pixel-nudging to get things to line up again.

If you want to know more about the how or why, here is a link to a presentation a gave at MelbCSS about the problem this has solved for our teams — Teaching CSS to talk like a designer

Current Solution

Using CSS transforms we can translate the text back onto the baseline where it should be.

The goal is for everything to be scalable. If the font-size is changed or a new level in your typographic hierarchy introduced, it would be great not to have to recalculate the descender height every time.

Usage

Install the mixin into your project, from npm or bower, and pass it the following parameters:

LESS

eg.

@import (reference) "basekick/mixin";

.MyHeading {
  .basekick(<options>);
}

bk-type-size-modifier (required)

The multiplier for type font size, relative to the base font size of your document.

bk-descender-height-scale (required)

The height of the descender expressed as a ratio of the font.

bk-type-row-span (required)

The number of rows the type should span.

bk-grid-row-height (required)

The number of pixels for each grid row.

bk-base-font-size (required)

The base font size on which your type size modifiers are based.

bk-line-height-override (optional)

Explicit line height override to set an exact value in exceptional cases.

JS

eg.

var basekick = require("basekick");

var myHeadingStyles = basekick(options);

options (required)

Options Type Required Description
typeSizeModifier int Y The multiplier for type font size, relative to the base font size of your document.
typeRowSpan int Y The multiplier for type font size, relative to the base font size of your document.
descenderHeightScale int Y The multiplier for type font size, relative to the base font size of your document.
baseFontSize int Y The base font size on which your type size modifiers are based.
gridRowHeight int Y The number of pixels for each grid row.
lineHeightOverride int N Explicit line height override to set an exact value in exceptional cases.

Example

The following example has the following design requirements:

  • Base font size is 10px.
  • Grid rows are 9px high.
  • Standard type is 14px over an 2 grid rows.
  • Headings are 21px over a 3 grid rows.

Variables

@base-font-size: 10;                    // Base font size
@grid-row-height: 9px;                  // Height of grid rows
@font-descender-height-scale: 0.14;     // The descender height for the specified font expressed as a scale

@standard-type-scale: 1.4;
@standard-row-span: 2;

@heading-type-scale: 2.1;
@heading-row-span: 3;

Card component styles

.card {
  font-family: Helvetica Neue;
}

.card__content {
  .basekick(@standard-type-scale,
            @standard-type-descender-height,
            @standard-row-span,
            @grid-row-height,
            @base-font-size);
}

.card__title {
  .basekick(@heading-type-scale,
            @heading-type-descender-height,
            @heading-row-span,
            @grid-row-height,
            @base-font-size);
}

WIP

  • Sass version
  • Stylus version

Credits

Typography images from Wikipedia

License

MIT