There’s a whole layer of CSS that lives just below the surface of most interfaces. It’s not about layout, spacing, or typography. It’s about shape. About cutting through the default boxes and letting your UI move in new directions. This series is all about one such family of features, the kind that doesn’t just style your layout but gives you entirely new ways to shape, animate, and express your interface.

Random functions in programming languages are amazing. You can use them to generate variations, to make things feel spontaneous and fresh. Until now there was no way to create a random number in CSS. Now, the random() function is on its way. You’ll be able to create a random animation delay, layout content at a random place on the screen, create a random color, or anything you want — all without any JavaScript.

In this article, I will cover the basics of Anchor Positioning and how I wish I had learned it earlier. Please use Chrome on a desktop or laptop if you want to try the interactive demos. If not, I’ve attached a video for most of the demos.

There are multiple tools that can help create a fluid font-size calculation for CSS – generally expressed as a clamp() function combining em (or rem) with vw (or vi) units. But the results are difficult to understand at a glance, so I wanted to visualize what’s going on, and how the various units interact.

When it comes to new CSS capabilities you don't have to avoid using them because there's not much browser support. Lean into progressive enhancement instead. It'll cover a lot of cases for you.