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Experiments

Collected isometric UI mockups

Dashboards, cards and menus with a little depth.

Typography on a tilted plane is readable only in small doses. A single word on the side of a block looks great; a paragraph set at an angle is exhausting. Keep running text flat and upright, and save the skewed type for labels, numbers and the occasional headline where the shape of the word matters more than speed.

9 imagesJPG, 1200 × 1200

Three colours carry the whole illusion. The top face is the lightest because it faces the sky, the left face sits in the middle, and the right face is the darkest. Keep those three roles consistent across the page and readers stop seeing flat shapes. Break the rule once, with a dark top on a single block, and the entire scene looks wrong.

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7 comments

  1. Hana Sato

    Is there a way to do the shadow without a pseudo-element? Our CMS strips empty spans.

    Reply to Hana Sato
    1. Chen Wei

      Glad it helped. The values are in the colour ratios reference.

      Reply to Chen Wei
  2. June Park

    Has anyone tried this with container queries? Feels like a good fit.

    Reply to June Park
  3. Ivo Petrov

    Works nicely in Firefox. Safari needed the prefixed transform-style for us.

    Reply to Ivo Petrov
  4. Rosa Medina

    The part about layer counts was eye-opening. Our landing page had over a hundred.

    Reply to Rosa Medina
    1. Nina Ahlberg

      Good question. Usually that means something is flattening the 3D context; check for overflow hidden on a parent.

      Reply to Nina Ahlberg
  5. Soren Dahl

    We used the grid background on our docs site and it looks great with a dark theme too.

    Reply to Soren Dahl

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