I have received several emails recently about creating galleries with CSS. Most people still use tables to create your basic image gallery in CSS. There is a much simpler way to do this with a list and some very easy CSS. Depending on what you want to do with your photo gallery you may want to have a caption or more information available on the page. This simple method can be expanded for use on staff pages or real estate sites to list houses for sale.

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Popularity: 14%

A lot of people give suggestions on how to improve your website or blog. Whether it is via SEO or design suggestions. Not many tell you what is going to destroy your website. I may be a little extreme but there are several pet peeves (as do many in the web design world) have that can truly turn your site from great to lame. There may be a couple of these that are straight forward but when dealing with clients it can become very obvious that some of their ideas on how a website should function are modeled after MySpace and the ilk.
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Popularity: 11%

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: 47%

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: 13%

Relative positioning can come in handy in CSS, you are much more powerful as a designer if you can place things in the exact location you are pressing towards. There are a lot of times when you want to put an object somewhere and you are unsure of how you are going to place it. Whether it be just outside of your box or just above another object. The position of your object in your HTML document is important in design. You can’t always just use the restrictive box for your web sites, web designs more and more are breaking out of the box form and becoming much more elegant designs. (more…)

Popularity: 8%

There are a lot of times when you want something to just be a few pixels higher than it is. Unfortunately for you the container of that element starts to soon. So you need to move it outside of the box. Your options in CSS? You can either use relative positioning or you can use negative margin. I’ll go over in another article so for now we will discuss the handy ability to use negative margin on objects. (more…)

Popularity: 7%

This week has been a busy, busy week. Not just at work though, it seems the blogosphere has been hard at work producing some excellent content for everyone (and not just on this design blog). It seems that design blogs everywhere are hard at work producing web design, CSS and inspirational design articles for everyone. I had to cut this list down a bit to get some great articles I wanted to share out. (more…)

Popularity: 6%

I actually found something out recently that I thought I would share with everyone. Somewhat of a minor little detail about CSS but still interesting none the less. It could come up, or possibly change in later versions of CSS but right now both ways are going to validate just fine. It turns out that when you end your last CSS attribute for a selector you don’t have to have your semicolon on the end of it. (more…)

Popularity: 6%

The Email Standards Project is an organization that plans to gain momentum by working with various email client creators to develop a standard for email markup. This could mean that newsletters, marketing emails and tons of other email messages that are sent will have the opportunity to be well designed again.

Ever since Microsoft changed the rendering engine in Outlook 2007 to the Word rendering engine there has been some rising up in the web design world. The Word rendering engine doesn’t render like anything. Outlook used to have IE which at least acknowledged CSS in a round about way.

The sad fact is that most email clients barely work with tables, if you nest more then one table you will easily see some issues arise. The fact that in newsletters we are having to resort back to tables says enough about the sad state of the email rendering engines.

The project currently lists various email clients and the state of their rendering engine and gives a full report on what all the rendering client supports in CSS and HTML.

There are a few people involved in making the Email Standards Project a realty that I would like to personally thank for their enthusiasm- Freshview, Mark Wyner and Luke Stevens for setting up this project. I really hope that the email client vendors take note and give in to the Email Standards Project, web designers around the world and the blogosphere’s pressure.

Popularity: 5%

Most designers don’t like spending a lot of money on stock photography or font discs, so there are numerous web sites available that offer quality, free stock images, fonts, icons and more. You have to be careful with some of the sites, you don’t want to get yourself in a legal mess by using something copyrighted in a commercial project. The sites I have listed here claim to adhere to copyright laws. (more…)

Popularity: 10%