In the first part of our Build a web app with Ruby on Rails series we created a layout view, as well as a header and footer. In this post we will add a paint of style to them.

Layout

It's important we keep our stylesheets well organized in separate files, based on the styles or elements they are connected. I usually start my apps with this application.css skeleton:

css
/*
 *= require reset
 *= require layout
 *= require header
 *= require footer
*/

I still use Meyer's reset.css file - with some tweaks - that you can find at his website. It removes margins and paddings, resets new HTML5 elements in older browsers, etc.

The layout.css file is occupied with the high level elements or classes used accross the application:

css
/* app/assets/layout.scss */

body {
  font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif;
  font-size: 15px;
  background: #f2f5f8;
  font-weight: 300;
}

a {
  text-decoration: none;
}

.app-cont {
  max-width: 1080px;
  margin: 0 auto;
}

.app-cont-thin {
  max-width: 650px;
  background: #fff;
  padding: 1em 0;
  border-radius: 3px;
}

Please note how we prefix the application-wide elements with app-, so that they differentiate from the same elements in internal pages.

Let's add the logo styles here too as they'll be used in both header and footer:

sass
/* app/assets/layout.scss */

.app-logo {
  a {
    font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif;
    font-size: 1.4em;
    color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.71);
    text-transform: uppercase;
    letter-spacing: 5px;
    text-shadow: 0 0 10px rgba(218, 62, 62, 0.32);

    b {
      color: rgba(255, 153, 153, 0.83);
    }
  }
}

We've placed the on of Roby on Rails logo inside a b element, which has allowed us to style it differently, this spicying it up a little.

Header

Next we style the header:

sass
/* app/assets/header.scss */

.app-header {
  margin-bottom: 3em;
  padding: 1.5em 0;
  background: rgba(53, 144, 202, 0.95);
  position: relative;

  .img {
    position: absolute;
    top: 0;
    left: 0;
    width: 100%;
    height: 100%;
    background: url('<%= asset_path "library.jpg" %>') center center no-repeat;
    background-size: cover;
    z-index: -1;
  }
}

The header has a semi transparent blue background, letting through an image of books to give the app a bit of context. The image is taken from the free image library Pixabay and prepared for the web in Photoshop.

Footer

The footer uses the same structure as the header, but a bit bigger:

sass
/* app/assets/footer.scss */

.app-footer {
  margin-top: 6em;
  padding: 4em 0;
  background: rgba(53, 144, 202, 0.95);
  position: relative;

  .img {
    position: absolute;
    top: 0;
    left: 0;
    width: 100%;
    height: 100%;
    background: url('<%= asset_path "library.jpg" %>') center center no-repeat;
    background-size: cover;
    z-index: -1;
  }

  .copy {
    padding-top: 2em;
    color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.6);

    a {
      color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.6);
      text-decoration: underline;

      &:hover {
        color: #fff;
      }
    }
  }
}

Conclusion

In this post we added some needed styles to our Books on Rails app. We accomplished that by creating separate stylesheets for sepearate concerns, e.g. layout, header, footer, and logo.

In the next post we will connect to the Amazon API to get the details about our books.

You can check out the previous posts in this series in: