Much used, oft maligned but always popular, drop shadows are a staple of graphic design. Although easy to accomplish with image-editing software, they’re not of much use in the fast-changing world of web design … until now.
Topic: Graphic Design
CSS Design: Creating Custom Corners & Borders Part II
Part I showed how to create fluid, dynamic CSS layouts with customized borders and corners. Part II advances to the next level, extending the technique to work with more complicated backgrounds such as gradients and patterns.
CSS Design: Custom Underlines
While web designers generally have a great deal of control over how a document should be presented, basic CSS doesn’t provide many options for the style of underlines below the links on a page. But with a few nips and tucks, you can take back creative control of the way your links look. Frequent ALA contributor Stuart Robertson shows how.
CSS Design: Creating Custom Corners & Borders
Must CSS layouts be boxy and hard-edged? In this article, we’ll show how customized borders and corners can be applied to fully fluid and flexible layouts with dynamic content, using sound and semantically logical markup.
Random Image Rotation
Readers return to sites that appear fresh and new on each visit. On a news site, magazine, or blog, stories or headlines will be updated frequently. But how can static sites keep that fresh feeling? Dan Benjamin’s free image randomizer may do the trick, and you needn’t be a programmer to install it.
CMS and the Single Web Designer
Content Management Systems free designers from the gruntwork of individual web page production. They may also free companies from the need to retain design staff. How do content management systems work, and what impact will they have on a web designer’s job?
The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes (and other notes on the distinction between style and design)
Why has the level of discussion in “design forums” degenerated so quickly? Maybe because they’re not populated by “designers.” Greenfield explains the difference between Stylists and Designers—and why that difference matters so much.
Reading Design
With so many specialists working so hard at their craft, why are so many pages so hard to read? Unabashed text enthusiast Dean Allen thinks designers would benefit from approaching their work as being written rather than assembled.
Information vs. Experience
The conflict between presentation and structure reveals two views of the web. Which one’s winning?
The Flash Aesthetic
Scaling, 2-D style, cycle-free motion, and heavy strokes. They’re not just web design trends any more. Join Olson on a cultural scavenger hunt as he tracks the ways Flash design techniques have crept into non-web media.
