Graphic Design
One main reason I detest 100% Flash-based sites so much is because they don't promote sharing and linking which are two big things to do on the Web. See a cool new game screenshot that you want to s...
Out with the orange, in with the green. As with my last redesign, only the CSS changed. A fun deviation with this one was that it was a collaboration between myself and Natalie over nearly 5,000 miles...
For as long as I've understood the issue, I've been an advocate of liquid layouts over fixed widths for web page design. Liquid layouts are layouts like the one used by this site, where the page adjus...
Spotted so far:
Lawrence Journal-World (where I work) - check out the funky blinking red eyes
Google - naturally
Radiac.net - "Randy Towers" ;)
Sam Ruby
Quite a poor showing really. I...
Travis Beckham's podLob features 56 experiments in Flash and 19 in Javascript/DHTML. I particularly liked the Flash image transitions. I'd probably complain bitterly I came across that kind of effect ...
My friend Andy's design skills have been recognised by the CSS Zen Garden. Congratulations! He's number 42....
I've always wondered how fonts work. I now have a much better understanding of the technology involved thanks to Microsoft's excellent Typography site, in particular this Introduction to hinting from ...
I've started browsing the web at 1600x1200, because I have a nice big monitor and a tendency to browse with my font size set to large. At this resolution you really begin to appreciate the argument pu...
Doug Bowman and Adaptive Path have launched the redesign of the Adaptive Path site. It's well worth exploring: the site looks gorgeous, and is a great example of best practise structural markup, CSS a...
Yet another groovy CSS demo: Drop shadow effects using only two nested divs and an alpha-transparent PNG. They look passable in IE as well. Another gem from Paul Hammond's link blog. Incidentally, Pau...
Michael Pick has kicked off an interesting discussion on the usefulness of Flash, which is continued on mezzoblue. The key idea under discussion is that while Flash has its uses it remains a fundament...
I've been planning a follow-up to my basic link styling tutorial for over a week now, but it's going to be a lot shorter now thanks to Al Sparber's excellent Uberlink CSS Rollover tutorial, which cove...
The CSS Zen Garden is growing at a pretty impressive rate, with another three submissions since I last checked it a few days ago: Friendly Beaches, Calm & Smooth and Viridity. Also added recently ...
Eric Meyer has released a new selection of designs over on Meyerweb. The designs are inspiring, and Eric's CSS is well worth perusing for style tips and insights in to reliable methods of creating rel...
Golden Mean is Doug Bowman's first contribution to the CSS Zen Garden, and it's a very nice piece of work. Even better is the fact that Doug has provided extensive coverage of the design process (incl...
If the 309 buttons at Steal these buttons aren't enough for you, you can now generate your own thanks to a clever PHP script on Minimal Verbosity. Bill Zeller has made the source code available as wel...
This is something we've needed for a long time. The CSS Zen Garden demonstrates CSS as used by graphic designers, and is a truly beautiful sight to behold. It currently showcases 5 radically different...
Wired have a fascinating article on the technology being used for The Matrix Reloaded. They've apparently achieved photo-realistic CGI humans using a technique caleld "image-based rendering" based on ...
As someone with virtually no graphic design skills, Create A Collage With Fireworks on SitePoint is the kind of article I'd love to see more of....
The alternative W3C buttons on AntiPixel are great. Jamie Zawinsky suggested recreating them in CSS. Stuart Langridge, Marek Prokop, Nick Boalch and Eric Meyer all had a go. Eric even did the Raging ...
This site now sports a funky favicon, care of Nat....
What Do I Know points to Macromedia's progress report explaining how thy have been responding to feedback on their recent site redesign. Todd Dominey makes the following insightful observation:
Pe...
The WThRemix contest has posted a list of submitted entries. The contest (to design a new homepage for the W3C) asked entrants to use valid tableless XHTML, CSS and meet WAI accessibility level 1. The...
Scott Andrew has been hit by redesign fever as well. His reworking is accompanied by a change in direction:
For a lot of the past two years, I've been grappling with this dual existence of mine, ...
James Buckley links to a new report on How people evaluate a web site's credibility. His comments:
Take a look and the first thing you'll notice is that Design was king of the hill with 46.1%, I ...
Eric Meyer's Color Blender is an incredibly useful tool for picking colours for a web site. Give it two different hexadecimal colour codes and it will calculuate and display between 1 and 10 "midpoint...
Mark invoked the lazy web earlier today in a bid to find a good way of bulk optimizing PNG files. Several people recommended pngcrush in the comments and it sounds like a fantastically useful piece of...
I got a good response to yesterday's call for help on finding an HTML element's co-ordinates on a page. I ended up using PPK's findPos functions which seemed to do the trick just fine.
Here's the r...
I'm really liking Jeffrey Zeldman's latest redesign. Aside from a pretty face, the markup holds some interesting ideas as well. For example, I've never seen a definition list used for a blogroll style...
I just can't figure out how Recursive was made....
Lots of people said it couldn't be done (myself included), but evidently we were wrong. Joe Gillespie shows how to achieve vertical centering with CSS in the latest edition of WPDFD. Via Craig Saila, ...
StopDesign is a superb example of a site that degrades gracefully for Netscape 4, thanks to a carefully crafted basic stylesheet. Doug discusses the necessity of including a browser upgrade message an...
Adam Polselli is a talented young designer who posts regularly on the SitePoint Forums. Get The Look is his new site (based on an article he wrote for SitePoint) which provides five excellent site tem...
And here it is: Flash Satay - Embedding Flash while Supporting Standards. It involves jumping througg a few hoops but the end result is a nice chunk of standards compliant code that can be used to emb...
Jeffrey Zeldman:
The next issue of A List Apart will publish a technique allowing designers to embed Flash movies while adhering to W3C specs and eliminating code bloat. No, really. Watch this spac...
Jeffrey Zeldman points to the newly redesigned v-2 Organisation site, which features a clever technique whereby a large background image is displayed "widescreen" style with different amounts of the p...
Joe Gillespie has been introducing CSS to the readers of Web Page Design for Designers.
CSS Positioning - How the browsers cope (from September) discusses browser support and explains Joe's exper...
tidakada has redesigned, with a funky new 4 column CSS layout and a brand new blog o' links....
DENG (via WaSP) is a W3C compliant XHTML/CSS/XForms rendering engine written entirely in Flash MX Actionscript.
Updated 27th July 2006: Link no longer points at a domain squatter....
Rob Tougher: My Guide To Digital Photography. A short but informative article on using Linux and Python to manage a collection of digital photographs....
CSS Image Rollovers describes a brilliantly simple technique for creating the effect of an image rollover using only one image and no javascript. The effect works by creating a gif with a transparent ...
AlltheWeb.com introduced an innovative feature called Alchemist a while ago which allows visitors to customise the site by specifying the URL to their own style sheet. They have now announced a CSS de...
placenamehere.com: Chris Casciano's Digital Playground. I love this design - Chris uses beautiful black and white photos for page backgrounds and carefully positions the main navigational element on e...
Moment of realisation: I just figured out what it is about Flash that bugs me so much. Flash is rubbish at text. Sure it can render text in pretty ways, but it never feels like real words. Flash takes...
Stuart Langridge discusses the nature of minimalism and CSS design, following a post by Sarabian. Stuart wonders if the current trend for relatively plain site designs is an interim period while we fi...
Chris Smith has an interesting set of CSS demos, including some attractive CSS buttons and an excellent example of a more complex layout. There's a lot of interesting creative work going on with CSS a...
Handy software tip courtesy of Tim (my colleague at Incutio). EyeDropper is a tiny shareware program for Windows which adds a magnifying glass to your mouse pointer, displaying the hex colour code of ...
In a discussion on css-discuss recently about underlines a on links, I pointed to kottke.org as an example of clever use of CSS for links where by the link underline is a slightly later colour than th...
I never thought I'd say this, but there is a place on this earth for web site splash screens and time wasting intro animations (now I'm feeling dirty). This comes after an interesting if slightly heat...
The Minimalist Web Project is a collection of good looking web sites adhering to the minimalist style, based on the idea that "less is more". Some beautiful sites are listed, including 37signals' bran...
Here's a treat for anyone with a browser that supports alpha transparency in PNGs (Mozilla and IE5/Mac do, IE/Win doesn't). Click on one of the little magnifying glasses under a thumbnail and the skin...
Mark Pilgrim continues to educate with day 24 of his series. Client side image maps need not pose a barrier to accessibility thanks to the helpful way in which alternative browsers use the alt attribu...
Logoed: logo inspiration for graphic designers. A large collection of real word logos to help kickstart the creative process....
The Scourge of Arial (via Zeldman). An interesting short history of modern typefaces and how Arial become widespread despite being merely a poor imitation of Helvetica....
I've never been any good at graphic design, but today I discovered a fantastic resource for Photoshop tutorials and general inspiration. This list of resources highlights the most useful threads of th...