Web Design Blog
CSS text effects you may not know about
December 17th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerThere 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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The importance of using lists for navigation
December 16th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerIt 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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Web design links for December 15th, 2007
December 15th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerThe 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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Opera files formal complaint against Microsft and IE
December 13th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerOpera’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.
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Using negative margin in CSS
December 10th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerThere 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. Read more »
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Email Standards Project, spread the word
November 29th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerThe 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.
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Using lists instead of tables for a gallery
November 26th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerIt seems that a lot of people have trouble migrating their sites over to CSS in place of tables when they run into simple gallery-like issues. The problem of getting 5 rows of items to all look even and function like they would in tables without using tables. Some of course would argue that a gallery is tablature data, I would disagree. Tables should be avoided for pretty much everything. Especially simple row/column galleries. When I have to create such a thing I will use lists in place of the tables. Read more »
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Using Faux Columns for same column height
November 12th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerAre you trying to get two or more columns to appear to be the same height with CSS? There is a trick in doing this that is extremely easy and by far the best method. This is a question that I hear quite a bit, because currently CSS by default doesn’t allow you to be able to do this. If you are wanting two columns, say a navigation column and a body copy column, to be the same height you can set them at a fixed height but this isn’t a good idea. Especially if you have a dynamic site, because with a dynamic site it is impossible to tell how much content is going to be where in your site. You definitely don’t want to have to go in and “manually” fix the column height every time the site gets updated. Read more »
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Using multiple CSS styles on a single element
November 5th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerI have been asked questions recently about using different sets of styles on elements and thought I would briefly touch on the subject to explain a little further. Have you ever wanted to use styleA and styleB on the same div? Well with classes you can, you can easily specify multiple classes on what div or any element that you want without any trouble at all. Read more »
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Detailed guide to using shorthand CSS in your cutups
October 29th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerUsing shorthand CSS can save some 1′s and 0′s in your stylesheets which add up if you have a busy web site. Just think, all those extra lines of codes taking up valuable bytes are adding up on that server. It may seem minimal at first but it does take up some space once you have enough sites on your server. Even if you don’t care that much about bandwidth or server stress- you are wasting valuable keystrokes by typing extra attributes and properties in your CSS. Read more »
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About Dustin Brewer
Dustin Brewer is a freelance web designer based out of Oklahoma City, OK passionate about web standards, and beautiful web design. Dustin Brewer has been in the web design industry for over 8 years through freelance and professional experience. If you are interested in hiring Dustin Brewer please visit the web design services page to find out more information. You can also checkout my web design portfolio.
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