There are a lot of different ways to display text using CSS, some of them are rather straight forward. Like assigning a color or setting the font size of your text. However, there are several text effects that you may not know about that can manipulate more then just the color or font size of the text. You can literally transform the text using various CSS rules. I’m going to show you a few that I think are kind of cool, some are handy and others are nearly useless in design. But they are all there and available to use, and I’m going to show you how.

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Popularity: 50%

It is important to use lists in navigation for semantics, accessibility, aesthetics and flexibility. Not using lists for navigation can lead to confusion, inaccessibility and unclear markup. There has been an article published from a popular CSS tutorial web site that is slightly misleading and generally not the best advice for developers and designers. It appears as though most of the people in the comments noticed right away some of the holes in the attempted “listless navigation” theory. I thought I would address the importance of using lists for navigation here. For some this may be an obvious practice in design but it is important enough to be addressed. I would like to be clear that I mean no disrespect to David Walsh or Chris Coyier, I’m sure they both only had good intentions of showing off what can be done with CSS.

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Popularity: 47%

I recently found a Wordpress plugin that allows for the translation using Google translate (or babelfish) of my entire site. I know that I get quite a bit of traffic from all over the world and so I thought it may help to have a translation available in various languages. I only speak English so it is tough for me to tell how well the translator is working.  I think it is a very rough translation but probably gets the point across better then most can translate from English to their native tongue. At any rate my site is now available in Italian, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, and Russian. My web design news will hopefully be better understood in all of these languages.

There should be more coming in the future I’m sure. The Wordpress plugin I have used is called Global Translater by nothing2hide.

Popularity: 27%

The year is getting close to an end and it seems that in these last couple of weeks of the year only the most dedicated bloggers are taking time to write posts. Which is great for those that are looking for content, but difficult for those of us that want to be sure to get all of the great stories we have read throughout the week out to those looking for great design content. At any rate, I have compiled a pretty good list of content. Thanks for everyone’s submissions for this week also. Be sure to submit your submissions by the end of day Friday this next week, and only submissions for posts that happened between Monday-Friday will count. I got a lot this time dating before last weekend.

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Popularity: 18%

I have been using Clicky for my day-to-day analytics for some time now. I like that they give you an embed that you can easily use within your own site so that you can type something like dustinbrewer.com/hits/ and see what your current traffic is. They are pretty accurate and give a ton of information that is well organized. I still use Google analytics but only for the monthly view, they don’t give the options to see live statistics. Which makes me crazy. Anyway, I was checking my traffic and discovered that they are offering 50% off their premium service, which is already cheap. Thought I would pass the message on.

Popularity: 9%

FreelanceSwitch, the popular freelance blog, has finally released their long awaited “Freelance Rock Star Book” with all kinds of great chapter for web designers, writers, graphic designers and photographers. It is a fantastic resource for anyone that is in the freelance business. It is an accumulation of what they have been writing about in their blog over the past year.

I have already ordered mine so I don’t have a full review of how it will turn out yet. But I’m sure it is a great book to get or to give away for Christmas. It is the freelance source for this Christmas season (and probably 2008). Chapters are as follows:

• Getting Started
• Your Brand
• The Working Day
• Getting Your First Jobs
• Scoping and Time Frames
• Pricing Yourself
• Doing the Job
• Clients
• Getting Paid
• Marketing Yourself
• Building a Business

A great list of chapters that all sound right on topic for what most of us freelancers are looking to focus on. You can buy the book from this site.

Popularity: 13%

Opera’s CTO announced that they are filing a formal complain against Microsoft and the Internet Explorer browser. Their complaint is about their lack of support for web standards and the disservice they have done to the web community at large. Opera calls for the support of the web community in this charge.

This is fantastic, I’m glad that Opera has stepped up and shown their support for web standards vocally. Most in the web community have known that the Opera web browser has been the largest supported and advocate of web standards. Not many outside of the web design community have been aware of this though. Most don’t even realize that web standards is an issue. I hope that something actually comes out of this, I would like to see an update that makes IE7 web compliant. It is insane for such a large company to know adhere to web standards such as Microsoft does.

Popularity: 11%

We all have our different practices that we use for starting a design of any kind. Sometimes we start with paper and pen or sometimes we may even jump right into Photoshop or Illustrator and begin tossing around ideas. One step we can’t skip though is choosing the right color scheme for our design. It is always important to ensure that we understand the color we use in our design. Whether our design be a web site design or print work the color combination we choose is one of the most important choices. In order to ensure that we have a combination that will work well there is always some research that may be done. Especially when it comes to designing a logo or doing branding for a company.

There are several web sites available for designers from Oklahoma to Japan to find color schemes that will match their client’s or own design ideas. There is even color software available for web designers to use for pulling color from images.
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Popularity: 14%

Ask.com has announced that they are launching a new feature to their search portal that will allow visitors to search the internet through their service anonymously. This means that your concerns for your search data and privacy safety when using Ask.com to search are gone. Not that it was a huge concern from Ask specifically but with AOL’s recent release of search data there seems to be a big concern about what can be found out from it.

There were a lot of the searchers from that release whose identity was found due to the data. Some of the people were a little less then happy what was found out about them. The AskEraser service will go live at Midnight on Tuesday. For more information about the service read their press release on the subject.

Popularity: 5%