“Typography for the Web has come a long way since Tim Berners-Lee flipped the switch in 1991. Back in the days of IE 1.0, good web typography was something of an oxymoron. Today things are different. Not only do we have browsers that support images (gasp!), but we have the opportunity to make our web pages come to life through great typography.”
A must read.
Smashing Magazine has compiled a list of new CSS techniques that are extremely powerful.
Powerful CSS-Techniques For Effective Coding
If you're a big fan of building quality websites then you must check out Carsten Cumbrowski's article on the 50 questions that you should ask yourself about the website you're building.
“ If the answer to every question that follows below was answered with yes, you can be very pleased with yourself and consider yourself the top of the crop, because most websites have flaws for a number of different reasons, mostly related to the limitation of resources and sacrifices that must be made as a direct result of the shortage. ”
50 Questions to Evaluate the Quality of Your Website
Antonio Lupetti of Woork has posted five sweet menu tutorials for us to consume. Big ups!
“ This post is a compilation of the most visited posts on my Blog about "web design" topic. It includes five CSS menu tutorials inspired to some Web 2.0 sites with round corners, scriptaculous and ajax effects. ”
Five Web 2.0 CSS Menu Tutorials
This is like the most original slash creative CSS site map diagram ever, created by some elite ninja at beTech. I don't know what to say; this is just too sexy.
Here's an original use of the CSS overflow property. Kudos to Alen Grakalic of pixelpusher.biz~
“This tutorial is aimed at controlling the size of the thumbnails appearing on your page. Sometimes we don't have enough space to spare to fit in large thumbnails and yet we would like to avoid small and barely recognizable images. Using this trick we limit the default dimensions of the thumb, and show it in full size when user mouse-overs it.”
Create Resizing Thumbnails Using Overflow Property
Eric Wendelin explains the table-layout css property and how to use it effectively. Although it's rarely used, it's extremely useful. Moral of the story is that table-layout: fixed; is fast but dumb and table-layout: auto; is slower but smart.
Use the table-layout CSS property to speed up table rendering
“All you need to add a Favicon to your site is a Windows Icon (.ico) file called favicon.ico that you upload to the main directory of your website...Some browsers will look for a direct link in the HTML source code to your site's favicon.ico file. You can help these browsers by adding this link in the head section of each page on which you want the Favicon.ico to appear.”
Mysteries Of The Favicon.ico — How To Create A Favicon In Photoshop
Samuel Ryan of Wake Up Later has five predictions on the next five years of website freelancing. I think this is a must read for all aspiring web designers.
“First, there will be greater demand for people who know and operate within the online culture. Second, you must stay relevant and informed if you want to keep your opportunities and career paths open. Back in the late nineties, "knowing some HTML and graphics" could still get you good work. Of course, that just doesn't cut it nowadays -- so as you look to the next several years, beware of the the same pitfall and always continue assimilating new technologies.”
The Next Five Years of Website Freelancing
“Myoats is a place where people can create, download & showcase beautiful designs. The Most Liked designs are pushed up by user’s opinion.”
I'm a big fan of Blueprint CSS. As a matter of fact Designer Success uses Blueprint CSS 0.6 :]
“Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.”
A note to CSS beginners, although Blueprint is really easy to use, try not to use it before you get the CSS foundations down pat. It's like driving a race car before getting your license; you can drive it but there's a good chance of you crashing, which could ruin your day.
Dejan Cancarevic of StylizedWeb has posted a list of CSS hacks and tricks, mainly for browser compatibility. This list is not for beginners of CSS as there are no description or explanation for the hacks but CSS ninjas should appreciate this list.
Ross Bruniges posted another good hack in comments, albeit a dirty dirty hack :p
basically zoom:1 will trigger ‘hasLayout’ on any element ie IE (and therefore fix about 80% of the weird IE layout bugs.
It will invalidate your CSS as it’s a proprietary technique (created by Microsoft) but if it’s in an IE CSS file then who really cares ;>
http://stylizedweb.com/2008/02/14/10-best-css-hacks/
Jessica Hupp of College Degree has compiled a list of open courseware for web designers. These courses should provide a pretty solid foundation for novice web designers and some missing puzzle pieces for the ninja web designers.
60+ Killer Open Courseware Collections for Web Designers
A list of photoshop tutorial lists! This will keep you occupied for a while :)
A Nice List of Great Photoshop Lists
CSS Type Set lets you experiment with typography on the fly. It's a bit sluggish for me (could be just me) and it'd be nice if you could change the units but the concept is great.
10 Mistakes in Icon Design by Denis Kortunov
Update: also check out Apple Human Interface Guidelines for some icon design insights.
It's interesting to see the different iterations the designer went through. We can see that in the end, less is more.
How Google Got Its Colorful Logo
Smashing Magazine keeps pumping out these great articles! The 10 Principles are:
How many of these principles have you used? Check out the 10 Principles of Effective Web Design.
Bookmark this page now, go go go!
- 9 Essential Design Principles
- The Importance of White space
- 8 Design Tactics to Help You When You're Stuck
- 10 Great Website Redesigns of 2007
- The Open Source Web Design Toolbox: 100 Web Design Template Sources, Tools and Resources
- Top 100 Online Generators for Web 2.0
- 19 Things NOT to do When Building a Website
- Ultimate Web Development Cheat Sheet...
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