Set text on the web to a baseline grid with Sass & rems. Sassline can be used for blogs, prototyping, and other web projects. It has recommended base typography styling and mixins to work proportionally from the baseline grid. Select a modular-scale for each breakpoint and work responsively type-first.
Version 2 of Sassline has been vastly improved with the use of Sass 3.3. The mixins are now much more powerful and flexible. They might look pretty complicated so make sure to keep reading to find out how to use them and how they work. Note: as in v1.1 pixel fallbacks are not included.
A demo of Sassline in action can be viewed with web fonts here, and local fonts here.
There are many different options when it comes to boilerplates, frameworks and pattern libraries these days. Sassline has one aim and one aim only – to spread better typography across the responsive environment that is the web.
The idea is to have easy to use and maintain SCSS files utilising the power of Sass to make the complex calculations to set type on a baseline grid on the web, with a production ready CSS output. Using rems for the font-sizing and the spacing measurements gives a simple way to use the proportions of the baseline grid throughout the design. Sass mixins do all the heavy lifting so your job is easy.
OpenType features are enabled to give the nicest formatting of text and some flourishes in the headings if available in the web font and supported in the browser.
Getting the most out of OpenType features can end up with large typeface files being served to your site as discussed on the Typekit blog. Included in Sassline is a method for using a smaller kit (without the full character sets) at smaller viewport sizes where OpenType support is low anyway to save downloading the extra characters.
Sassline is based on setting the root font-size as half the line-height of the paragraph text. The height of the baseline grid is then effectively set at 2rem, with increments at each 1rem. This makes it nice and easy to work proportionally from the baseline with integer rem values.
Last year I wrote my dissertation on responsive typography at university. Sassline takes some of my thoughts from this and puts them into action. You can also read some more about how it came about here. Version 2 has come pretty far and I hope to write about this soon.
Sassline is fully commented with details in the SCSS. Set the font sizes with the font-size mixin and use rems for everything else.
Use Sass 3.3.7+ and Sass-Globbing.
sass -r sass-globbing --watch assets/sass:assets/css
Alternatively a mixture simple project settings file is included
Viljami Salminen’s responsive-nav.js plugin is included to provide a mobile ready navigation to work from.
- Improved documentation
- More complex demos
- Lightweight Sass grid system
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Copyright (c) 2013 Jake Giltsoff
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