Interface Craft: Grid Areas, Tailwind Tokens and Banners

Polished interfaces need both visual tools and project glue: grids that read like a sketch, theme values that survive a migration, headers with character, config files that convert cleanly, and a map of how packages depend on each other. This guide covers the CSS Grid Named Areas Builder, Tailwind to CSS Variables, Figlet Banner Designer, Plist to JSON & XML, and Monorepo Dependency Graph Viewer.

Grids you can sketch, themes you can migrate

The grid builder validates a matrix of area names against two CSS rules: every name must be a valid identifier, and every named area must form a solid rectangle — L-shapes and disconnected cells are rejected with the offending name. Empty cells use ., and the output is complete CSS: display: grid with grid-template-areas, grid-template-rows, and grid-template-columns plus one .name { grid-area: name; } rule per area.

.grid-container {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-areas:
  "header header"
  "sidebar main";
  grid-template-rows: 1fr 1fr;
  grid-template-columns: 1fr 1fr;
}

The Tailwind transpiler parses a theme object literal (comments stripped, module.exports accepted) and walks the colors, fontFamily, and spacing sections into sorted --color-*, --font-family-*, and --spacing-* variables. Hex colors gain -rgb companions (#ff0000 → 255 0 0) for opacity modifiers, <alpha-value> placeholders are preserved, arrays join font stacks with commas, and function values are skipped with a warning instead of crashing the run.

Banners, plists, and package graphs

The banner designer renders five embedded fonts — Standard, Slant, Small, Big, Mini — from a compact 5-row A–Z glyph set with per-font transforms (Mini compresses to 3 rows, Big doubles each cell, Slant offsets rows). Spaces, multiline input, and a 120-column maxWidth with truncation are handled; characters outside the set render as ???/? ? placeholders and are listed as unknownCharacters so nothing fails silently. It is ideal for CLI headers and README art.

The plist converter is a hand-written XML parser that understands dict, array, string, integer, real, date, data, true, and false, skipping comments, processing instructions, and doctypes, with errors pinpointed by line number. plistToJson extracts values (dates normalized to ISO, base64 whitespace-tolerant); jsonToPlist rebuilds a full Apple document with the XML declaration and DOCTYPE, emitting integers vs. reals by shape, ISO strings as <date>, and base64-looking strings under data-ish keys as <data>.

Direction	Handling
Plist → JSON	entities decoded, <integer> validated as digits
JSON → Plist	XML-escaped, Apple DOCTYPE included

The monorepo viewer parses pnpm-workspace.yaml packages: globs, matches each package.json by glob, and classifies every dependency as internal (a workspace: spec or a name present in the workspace) or external. Depth-first search reports cycles explicitly, Kahn's algorithm yields a topological build order (cyclic leftovers appended deterministically), per-package layers count the longest downstream chain, and the whole DAG renders as Mermaid flowchart TD with version specs as edge labels.

Try Them

• Figlet Banner Designer — render ASCII art headers in five fonts.
• Plist to JSON & XML — convert Apple property lists both directions.
• Monorepo Dependency Graph Viewer — visualize workspace DAGs, cycles, and build order.
• Tailwind to CSS Variables — transpile theme config to CSS custom properties.
• CSS Grid Named Areas Builder — build grid-template-areas visually.