Zhou Fan is a painter exhibiting globally as one of the exciting new contemporary Chinese artists. His images are unmistakably Asian, from their subject matter to their colour palettes, his world is both surreal and fairytale like. I love the detail, the very Asian fish motifs and bizarreness of his scenes. The characters seem to be simultaneously suffering and detached from their reality, all very intriguing!

Fan often references his childhood when talking about his work, the paintings do indicate a fractured or distorted view of reality, where the imagined and the real co-exist as equal entities.

CSS has a great property called ‘vertical-align’. Except that it often doesn’t do what we expect it to. For those of us who started out with tables (not that we’d admit it in public!), we remember the good old “valign” property, which did exactly what it said on the tin. It centered an element vertically within a table cell. Coupled with our other old friend “align”, we were actually able to get something in the middle of a box, which was nice. Now, these 2 elements have been disbarred because we rightly adhere to the principle of separation of content and presentation. But every so often you just wish you could use ‘valign’ to work it’s magic and you end up doing crazy things like changing the ‘display’ property of elements to ‘table’ and ‘table-cell’ in the vain hope that ‘vertical-align’ might work the way you want it.

What we want to achieve

First, a brief explanation of how ‘vertical-align’ does actually work. It’s designed for use with inline elements only. The main use case being that it allows you to dictate how an image (or other inline element) will position vertically relative to the baseline of text. There are a few good write ups on this, which really explain it in detail and I’d recommend you check out Chris Coyier’s write up on the subject over on CSS Tricks.

The Problem

The problem with vertical-align is that it only works to align inline elements relative to text. What this means is that if you have no text, ‘vertical-align’ will have no effect. The reason this is a problem for me is that I would like to be able to control vertical positioning of an image or many images within a div where there is no text, without resorting to specific margins or javascript. And my memories of the good old days of ‘valign’ make me think I should be able to do this. I have 2 concrete examples of where I would like to use vertical alignment:

1. Often I’ll be asked to create a logo bar on a site to show suppliers, brands stocked, businesses involved, etc. Logos come in all shapes and sizes but generally I’d like them to align vertically in the block for better presentation. When there’s no text in the block (because it’s just logo images), vertical-align gives me no control and I feel I have to resort to individual margins which is less than ideal.
2. I design interfaces for online stores quite a bit. They are built on a content management system and they are mostly used by small businesses who don’t tend to have a graphic designer on hand to prepare images. My trusty devs ensure that product images are resized so they fix within width and height restrictions but the thumbnails are often landscape or vertical whereas the thumbnail space in my design is usually square to allow for either. To make the whole interface look a bit nicer, I’d like to be able to vertically and horizontally centre the thumbnail image within its block but again there’s no text, just an image, so vertical-align doesn’t work for me.

The Solution

Case #1

Starting with case #1, let’s look at a logo bar. Now these HTML5 logos are all nice and tidy, mostly the same width and height except for the larger one in the middle. Doesn’t look too bad but I’d still like to align them along the middle.

View the example – without vertical alignment set to middle.

View the example – with vertical alignment set to middle.

With the technique applied

The CSS for this is simple and takes it’s lead from the “clearfix” solution that has been around for quite a while. (Aside: on the subject of clearfix, have you seen the new micro clearfix? No more collapsing margins!) Since vertical-align needs text to work, we give it text! Using the pseudo-element “::after”, we insert a period (“.”) after the content in our div. Then we change the visibility to hidden so that it still takes up space but doesn’t introduce any unnecessary html in our document.

p>

Our logos are just a list of images in HTML wrapped in a div with class “logoBar”. The CSS looks like this:

.logoBar::after {
	content: ".";
    visibility: hidden;
}

.logoBar img {
	vertical-align: middle;
}

It’s not really relevant here, but if you wanted to you can add a line-height (to set the space in which the images align vertically) to the logoBar div as follows:

.logoBar {
	line-height: 256px;
}

Case #2

In our second example, we have only 1 image but we want it to center both vertically and horizontally within a block. There’s a method for centering an image horizontally that I regularly use – you change the ‘display’ property of the image to ‘block’ and set it’s margin to ‘auto’. But that won’t work here as ‘vertical-align’ only works on inline elements (as in ‘display: inline’ OR ‘display: inline-block’ it will work for both. Images are natively ‘inline’). However, because we have added some text to get ‘vertical-align’ to work (in the form of the hidden “.”), ‘text-center’ now works as well.

View the example – single image in a block: horizontal and vertical central alignment

With the technique applied - fully centred

Our HTML is simple, it’s a single image wrapped in a div with class ‘thumbnail’. Our CSS looks like this:

.thumbnail {
	background: #ddd;
	width: 350px;
	height: 350px;
	line-height: 350px;
	text-align: center;
}

.thumbnail::after {
	content: ".";
    visibility: hidden;
}

.thumbnail img {
	vertical-align: middle;
}

Apart from using the ‘::after’ pseudo element and ‘vertical-align’ same as the previous example, note that our wrapper has an explicitly set width and height and ‘line-height’ as well as ‘text-align:center’. This technique will work just fine without the ‘width’ and ‘height’ set – the div will inherit the width and the height will be set by the line-height. However, without the line-height set the technique won’t work for vertical aligment and without ‘text-align: center’ the horizontal alignment won’t work.

Conclusion

And there you have it. Getting an image centered horizontally and vertically within a div is something that has annoyed me for a while and I dislike having to hack together solutions using ‘display: table-cell’, ‘position: absolute’ and other complicated techniques. The beauty of this solution is its simplicity. I hope you find many uses for it, I know I have.

Appendix

I mentioned the CSS Tricks article explaining vertical align. You can find it here: http://css-tricks.com/2597-what-is-vertical-align/

Another handy article with explanations of inline vs block elements and some other centering techniques appears on NoobCube: http://www.noobcube.com/tutorials/html-css/horizontal-and-vertical-centering-using-css-a-beginners-guide-/

HTML5 logos are (I presume) property of the W3C and are used under Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Licence (as far as I can tell!): http://www.w3.org/html/logo/

I first came across Sarah Illenburger through the cover she did for the amazing / inspiring / slightly scary Papercraft book.

Illenberger studied in London (Chelsea and Central St Martins, impressive!) & currently resides in her native Germany. She creates great concept art relying on her skills in photography, composition and colour awareness and her great sense of humour! A lot of her work is sculptural in nature, paper art also crops up quite a bit in her impressive portfolio. Illenberger has a great collection of prints for sale from her shop, all incorporating her trademark wit and beautiful balance of shape and colour.

Susie Wright is an inspired illustrator and printer based in Edinburgh & London, i’d also call her a sculptor, based on her incredible origami deer (see photo above, beautiful!). She also has some fab textile designs that perfectly marry her own unique style to the medium. I love her screenprinting / illustrative style, it’s quite fragmented and modern while subject matter tends to focus on naturalistic elements, great combo!

Check out her blog here and her site here for more info and beautiful work.

Starting this week we’ll be doing a series of posts highlighting some of the cooler JavaScript effects going on out there on the web.

To kick things off we have Type/Code who have made an amazing exploding header animation using JavaScript (looks like Yahoo’s YUI). When the page first loads there is a nice animation of the font being generated by squares which seem to bounce into place. Once the logo has loaded the real fun can start! Simply rollover the logo to have it explode into tiny pieces and watch it build itself back up again. Great fun!

Check it out over at: http://typeslashcode.com/

Bison Art are a design studio based in New Zealand. They have a very strong, painterly illustrative style, I particularly love the “Lost Woman” illustration first here. A lot of the illustrations have an ethnic / African feel, all beautifully textured and layered.

Their design work contrasts somewhat with this as quite modernist and minimalist, some beautiful bespoke typography as well.

I first came across Meg Paradise when she was working for Modern Dog, a GREAT poster design company (among other things, the posters are my favourite though!).
Meg now co-runs her own design studio with two partners, Parliament of Owls, well done Meg! That’s class.

Meg is particularly talented with illustration and typography, she is very versatile in both, well able to deliver a great vintage / retro buzz or modern / quirky / handdrawn feel. Her illustrative and typographical skills come together perfectly in her book covers, they all have loads of personality and capture a certain atmosphere. I’m particularly weak for her typography, it all just feels so RIGHT!

Check out her work (there’s lots more!) on her site and behance.

Today is the second anniversary of Heinz Edelmann’s death.  The man most famous for his landmark work on the Beetles Yellow Submarine film and merchandise.  Apart from this iconic legacy, Edelmann also produced a lot of celebrated work as an illustrator, including posters, book covers and magazine illustrations, all of which seems to be (perhaps understandably!) overshadowed by his work on Yellow Submarine.

Yellow Submarine is the ultimate pit-stop for inspiration on psychedelia, Blue Meanies are perhaps my favourite characters!  For more information, check out the Milton Glaser online archives and read this transcript of an interview with 21st Century Radio.

Gary Baseman is an incredibly prolific artist with a world-wide cult following. His outputs include his very distinctive paintings, animations, vinyl toys and clothes, plus an ongoing photo documentary of the travels of his creation, Toby. He both exhibits and lectures frequently and there is a huge number of interviews with him online. They are notable for his honesty and advice, some of my favourites are from altpick.com and crowndozen.com.

Baseman coined the term “Pervasive art” specifically to describe his own art. His style has been compared to early Disney animation, but with a certain slightly perverse twist! His work aims to (among many other things!) “blur the lines between fine art and commercial art.” (wikipedia). It represents a new wave of pop art, staying relevant to popular culture today.

Timelapse Painting Two from Pat Perry on Vimeo.

Pat Perry’s style is very diverse, his paintings and illustrations are quite different, but the underlying feeling of surreality and something slightly twisted and not quite right is present in both. It’s this slightly macabre edge i’m such a fan of, also of his incredibly technical ability. The time-lapse video here BLOWS MY MIND, such talent, I love the insight into how he paints, firing the paint onto the work! It’s hard to believe he doesn’t use more digital methods in his process, I guess he just gets it right first time round! Check out more on his vimeo.

I’m always amazed by artists sketchpads as well! The last image here is an excerpt from his sketch pad, it’s so good! More can be found on Perry’s blog.