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What’s up, my neighbor? This is your boy, Darryl Tec. I am here to teach you how to create a responsive and awesomely scalable icon using CSS sprites. On top of that, we will also add a fallback for browsers that do not support SVG files.

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Quick FAQ.

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SVG - Stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. In short it scales perfectly and you don’t need to worry about having a pixelated image anymore.

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Sprite - Google said it’s a fairy. This is not a fairy. It’s just a bunch of different icons in 1 image. Use it as background image and shift the positioning to show 1 icon. This saves you a lot of loading time. Because instead of loading, say 10 images, you’re loading just 1.

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CSS - Cascading Style Sheet. If you don’t know what this is, I have bad news for ya.

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Let's Begin

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First things first, we need a sprite image that consists four icons – or more, it’s up to you. Luckily, I have one in my digital pocket.

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We’re just going to use a normal PNG file at first and change it later. Make sure it has a transparent background.

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Now, let’s make their placeholder. The icons you see above is using a grid of 32px by 32px and it’s lining up vertically. I made it like that so it’s easier to find anything, you’ll see why later.

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</pre>\n  <div class="frame"></div>\n<pre>
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Now we need to style them.

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.icon {\n  width: 32px;\n  height: 32px;\n  background: #eee;\n  float: left;\n  background-image: url("[ put your image here ]");\n  background-size: 100% auto;\n  /*extra fluff*/\n  margin: 10px;\n  border-radius: 5px;\n}
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Explanation

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Looks simple right? But the one thing that’s very important here is the background-size, which makes our sprite responsive. When you put 100% as the value, it will stretch the image depending on what width and height you have. So, be very careful when putting a value on both X and Y axis, because this will distort the image. To stop it from distorting, you should only put a value on one axis and put the other on ‘auto’ so the image scales proportionally.

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If you look at the image I provided, there’s only one icon on X-axis. That means we can just say 100% on X and auto on Y.

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So, we get background-size: 100% auto.

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Cool, right? No crazy percentage. Your icon should look like this:

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It’s time to map those icons properly. Facebook is not a problem because it’s first on the list. But for defaults sake, let’s add a code for it.

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 .icon.facebook {\n   background-position: 0 0;\n   background-color: #3b5998;\n }
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The positioning of 0 0 will map it to the top left of the element.

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For the background-color, you can get almost all of the official social icon colors in hex here.

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How about the rest? Well, there’s a simple formula for that.

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The raw CSS way

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Since we’re making this responsive, we need to use percentage. We need to get the height of the image via percentage. Remember what I said earlier about x and y and scaling proportionally? Since the icons are lined up vertically, we need to get the Y-axis, which is the height. The easy way to do that is to just use 100% and never touch x axis again.

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Now, we have to get the position of the icons. Let’s start by counting the icons starting with 0 (zero).

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0 = Facebook

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1 = Google

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2 = LinkedIn

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3 = Twitter

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Facebook isn’t really a problem because we already know where it is. So, let’s exclude it from the count. That gives us 3 icons. We can now use those numbers to get the icon position.

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imageHeight = 100%
\niconCount = 3
\niconPosition = [1,  2 or 3]
\nWe need to go downwards on the sprite. That means it’s negative.

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-imageHeight / iconCount * iconPosition
\n-100% / 3 / 1 = 33.33% is Google’s position
\n-100% / 3 / 2 = 66.66% is LinkedIn’s position
\n-100% / 3 / 3 = 99.99% is Twitter’s position
\nThat gives us this code

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.icon.twitter {\n  background-position: 0 -33.33%;\n  background-color: #55acee;\n}\n.icon.linkedin {\n  background-position: 0 -66.66%;\n  background-color: #007bb6\n}\n.icon.google {\n  background-position: 0 -99.99%;\n  background-color: #F90101;\n}
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The Stylus way

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If you use stylus you can just do this:
\nCreate the mixin

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getPos(imageHeight, iconCount, iconPosition)\n  imageHeight / iconCount * iconPosition
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Then call it.

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.icon.twitter\n  background-position 0 getPos(-100%, 3, 1)\n  background-color #55acee\n \n.icon.linkedin\n  background-position 0 getPos(-100%, 3, 2)\n  background-color #007bb6\n \n.icon.google\n  background-position 0 getPos(-100%, 3, 3)\n  background-color #F90101
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By now your icon should look like this.

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