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A lot of photo apps allow you to add filters before sharing. The typical UI for picking a filter is a row of little thumbnails that can be horizontally scrolled. I’m sure you’ve used it many times. It looks something like this:

The problem

A filter picker like that is easy to understand and works pretty well. But in my case, there is something that has been bugging me a bit. Here is how I use it:

1. I start with the first thumbnail and then just keep tapping one after the other.
2. If there is a filter that I like, I try to remember its name. And somewhat its position, but more like “somewhere at the beginning”.
3. Then once I reach the end, I start scrolling back trying to find the ones I liked.
4. Usually there are like 2-3 filters that I would like to quickly compare before making my final choice. But it’s quite hard to scroll between them, especially if they are far apart. Also having to remember their name/position costs some precious brain power.

Now, I don’t really know how most people use these filter pickers. Could be that:

1. Most people just stop once they found a filter they kinda like and don’t bother trying the rest.
2. Or some have a few favorites and know their name/position already.
3. You could also just look at the little thumbnails. But some filters are very similar and I need to see them on the actual photo to judge.

Possible solutions

So I was thinking about some possible improvements:

1. Order by popularity

Automatically order the filters based on how often they get used. This makes filters that you use most appear at the beginning and are easier to get to. You could always keep scrolling in case you’re in the mood for something new. This would of course mess it up for people that have filters remembered by position. But not sure how many actually do that.

2. Manual re-order

Let people manually reorder the position. Could be done similar like the home screen icons on iOS (long press until they wiggle, then drag around). I would probably move my favorites to the front and also sort based on color/style.

3. Narrow down

Let people temporarily toss away the filters they don’t want. This would allow you to narrow down your selection to just a few for easier comparison. Of course, all the filters would be back next time you take a new photo.

Or probably even better (3B): Instead of throwing away the ones you don’t like (could be tedious if there are a lot of filters), you could push up only the ones you like and they would move to the right with a visual separator. It’s similar how you can pin a Chrome browser tab to separate it from the rest. Then once you scrolled to the end, you would have all your previously selected filters next to each other, waiting to be the lucky winner.

Conclusion

I understand that the suggestions might make a photo app more complicated and harder to explain to a new user. But it could be more a “power user” feature that you’re not forced to use if you don’t want to. Anyways, in case I’m not the only one with this (small) problem, I hope some day we will have a better way to filter filters. Ohh.. and let me know if you’re already using an app that tackles this somehow.

Update

Thanks for all the comments. Good to see more people thinking about this. I played around a bit more with the demo, mostly after the conversation with Ignacio in the comments below. So here a 4th option:

4. Select and cycle

Let people select a couple filters and then cycle through them by tapping on the photo. It’s actually similar to 3B, but it keeps the UI simple by using the photo as the secondary navigation control. Here the steps how to use:

1. You can tab each filter until you find one you like.
2. If you tab a 2nd time on that filter, it gets selected as a “favorite”. It will move up a little to visualize it.
3. You can keep trying other filters and mark more as favorites.
4. Once you reached the end (or think you have enough), you can tap on the photo above the filter picker to quickly cycle through all your previously selected (favorited) filters. Now comparing different filters is really quick and easy.

Try the demo.

The implementation of the demo could still be improved. It is a bit hard to discover that you can tap the photo to cycle through your favorites. Might need some visual clue to help understand it better. Adding swipe gestures instead of tapping would also improve UX. Or to remove a filter from your favorite selection, you could just swipe down on the image. Also note that the filters are CSS based and still a bit glitchy when animating. But you should get the idea.

Update II

Manuel Haring explored a similar concept where you can push up filters to narrow down your selection.

Here a larger video that has even a third selection stage.

The cascade in CSS is a curse and blessing at the same time. It usually works quite well, but there are issues that let people get all worked up and ask the question Do We Even Need CSS Anymore. I can somewhat relate to that - but I also think it’s not the cascade alone and also about fighting specificity. Not running into issues with specificity is hard. Almost as hard as pronouncing that word.

In this post I’ll try to show a few ways how you can make the cascade be your friend and maybe reduce the need of overriding and thus encounter less fighting with specificity.

Tip 1:

For every CSS property that you write, try to move it up the tree as far as possible. In other words: Back to the :root.

For example, our site has a side bar and we want to add a short bio to it. The markup might look something like this:

<body>
	<main class=“Posts”>
	<aside class=“SideBar”>
		<nav class=“Nav”>
		<p class=“Bio”>

And the CSS:

.Bio {
	font-size: .8em;
	line-height: 1.5;
	color: #888;
}

That would work. But if we look at the Nav that is already in the SideBar, chances are good that some of the styles are the same. In our case it’s font-size and color. So let’s remove those properties from Nav and Bio and add it to the shared parent element, the SideBar.

.SideBar {
	font-size: .8em;
	color: #888;
}

And as it turns out, that line-height: 1.5; is already defined for our Posts. So since it seems that the whole page uses the same line-height, let’s remove it from the Bio and Post elements and move it all up to the root node.

:root {
	line-height: 1.5;
}

This probably sounds like common sense, but often it’s tempting to just style your new thing without even looking if some of the sibling elements define the same thing. This also happens when you copy&paste styles from another section or when pasting some snippets you found online. It might take a bit more time to refactor and seems scary, but it should keep our CSS in a healthier state.

Style the branches, not each leaf

Tip 2:

Style certain properties always as a combo.

A good example is the color and background-color combo. Unless you make only small tweaks, it’s probably a good idea to always change them together. When adding a background color to an element, it might not contain any text, but probably some child will. Therefore if we set foreground and background color together, we can always be sure we won’t run into any legibility and contrast issues. Also, next time we change a background color, we don’t have to hunt for all the text colors that need to be changed too, it’s right there in the same place.

Screenshot from Colorable

Tip 3:

Use “dynamic” values, such as currentColor and ems.

Sometimes it might make sense to use the text color for other properties. Like for border, box-shadow or for the fill of SVG icons. Instead of defining them directly you can use currentColor and it will be the same the color property. And since color inherits by default, you might can change it in only one place.

Similarly ems are mapped to font-size allowing you to scale everything by just changing the :root font size.

Here a few more details on currentColor and EMs.

Tip 4:

Override UA Styles to inherit from its parents.

Form controls like buttons, inputs get styled by the browser in a certain way. Overriding them with inherit makes them adapt to your own styles.

button,
input,
select,
textarea {
	color: inherit;
	font-family: inherit;
	font-style: inherit;
	font-weight: inherit;
}

The example above is taken from sanitize.css. normalize.css does the same, so if you use them, you’re already covered.

You can also try to restyle other inputs like a range slider, radio, checkbox etc. And as seen above, by using currentColor, make them automatically match the color property. And maybe move them from a light into a dark theme without changing anything.

Conclusion

That’s all nice stuff, but who is it for? Well, of course it can’t be forced upon every situation. I would say small and simple web sites benefit the most. But even when using a preprocessor, it might not hurt if it reduces the amount of CSS that gets output or when a few variables aren’t even needed.

Also it seems suited for the “single purpose class” approach like Tachyons. It might reduce complexity and the amount of classes that are needed.

Another interesting thing could be the upcoming custom properties a.k.a. CSS variables. Unlike variables in preprocessors, when overriding a custom property, it will only affect the current selector scope. So in a sense they will be “cascading variables”. But I still have to try that out and see how it works in practice.

ps. It is possible that this post is inspired by this tweet.

Double-hue syntax themes for Atom.

DuoTone themes use only 2 hues (7 shades in total). It tones down less important parts (like punctuation and brackets) and highlights only the important ones. This leads to a more calm color scheme, but still lets you find the stuff you’re looking for.

A big thanks goes to @braver who did most of the initial language support.

Color variations

And here some more color variations created by other theme authors.

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Rotch Library - TR184.B75 2018

Rotch Library - N6888.B745 A4 2018

Rotch Library - N6488.I8 V433 2019 I73

Rotch Library - N6488.I8 V433 2019 M28

Rotch Library - TR183.A47 2018

Rotch Library - N8251.S555 A48 2018

Rotch Library - N6496.3.S9 Z876 2018

Rotch Library - N6488.I8 V433 2019 B33

Rotch Library - N6488.I8 V433 2019 A38

Rotch Library - TR647.B626 2019

Rotch Library - N6537.I26 A4 2018

Rotch Library - NX512.C36 A4 2018

Rotch Library - ND673.B73 B46 2018

Rotch Library - TR185.P52 2018

Rotch Library - N7153.N47 A4 2018

Rotch Library - TR15 B7813 2019

Rotch Library - N6488.I8 V433 2019 A11

Rotch Library - N6260.S56 2019

Rotch Library - NK2875.7.A9 T73 2019

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Rotch Library - NK3633.A2 Z36 2018

Rotch Library - NK2087.75.A1 B35 2019

Rotch Library - N7445.2.S35 2019

Rotch Library - ND3239.I72 B338 2020

Dewey Library - N345.S36 2018

Rotch Library - TR660.5.L97 2019

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Rotch Library - N5262.C56 P76 2019

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Rotch Library - ND553.G27 A4 2019

Rotch Library - TR74.B47 P34 2019

Rotch Library - NX650.E46 A39 2018

Dewey Library - N8600.H335 2018

Hayden Library - PQ7390.F459 C6613 2016

Hayden Library - PQ7081.W66 2017

Hayden Library - PQ7539.A47 O87 2017

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Hayden Library - PQ6672.I37 A2 2016

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Hayden Library - PQ7297.R89 A2 2017

Hayden Library - PQ7557.E5 O84 2016

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