CSS Typography: The Basics. Typography is an essential component of a website’s design. This is for good reason: good typography is not only imperative for aesthetic appeal, but also improves site usability when text legibility and readability concepts are applied. Typography is all about proportions and spacing. There are also font styles to consider. How can we use CSS for great typography in our web designs? This is a question we’ll try to answer. This is the first part of a three-part series of guides on CSS typography that will cover everything from basic syntax to best practices and tools related to CSS typography.
Typography CSS Properties There are two main groups of CSS properties that control typography style: font and text. The font CSS property group dictates general font characteristics such as font-style and font-weight. The text CSS property group deals with the characters, spaces, words and paragraphs. Font Sizing A simple use of sizing text is as follows: Absolute-size Relative-size Absolute Lengths. Learn to Code: The Full Beginner's Guide. 100 Exceedingly Useful CSS Tips and Tricks. You can never have too much of a good thing–and two good things we rely on in our work are tips and tricks. Nuggets of information, presented clearly and succinctly, help us build solutions and learn best practices.
In a previous article, we shared a jam-packed list of 250 quick web design tips. It seems only right to continue the trend by showcasing 100 fresh–and hopefully useful–CSS tips and tricks. General Not everything in this list was easy to categorize. All of the tips that are relevant and worthy of mention but don’t cleanly fit into a category are listed in this section. Conditional comments have been a godsend for resolving Internet Explorer inconsistencies. 1 It’s critical when working with CSS to be aware of the various properties at your disposal and how to use them correctly. 2 Using a good editor can increase productivity. 3 In many ways, experimentation is the mother of innovation. 5 Caching will conserve bandwidth for visitors and account for much faster speeds.
How Firebug Helps You Design Your Blog. If you want to make a few quick web design tweaks to your WordPress theme framework, Firebug, a free add-on for Firefox and Chrome, can help you do it. Let me explain. Firebug provides you with X-ray vision that exposes the HTML elements of your site and identifies the CSS styles at work. Even better, Firebug allows you to make changes to those styles in real-time, meaning you can make a change and see how it affects your website instantly Not a coder?
When you’re using a theme framework like Thesis, there are styles attached to each section of your blog—even if you can’t see them in action. This means, when you start using a web inspector tool like Firebug, all you have to do is add some CSS styles and you’ll be good to go. Firebug for Firefox Demonstration Figure 1. In most cases, you’d have to dig through your CSS file and discover why those footer links remain unchanged. However, what if you want to test out your change before you add it into your stylesheet? Figure 2.
Figure 3. Perfect! A Comprehensive Guide Inside Your <head> As web designers and developers, we pay so much attention to what’s directly on the screen (or in our code) that the <head> of a document and what’s inside is often considered as an afterthought. While in many cases it’s true that what appears on the screen is the most important part of a website (the content is what people visit a site for), the "thinking code" inside the <head> of our documents plays an important role. This article will examine exactly what can fit inside a website’s head. Mastering the Mind The head of an HTML document is a busy area, and while it may not have the range of elements that the <body> can flex, it can actually engineer a range of its own elements to play vital roles in how a site will operate or how it can interoperate with other sites.
Depending on the website, there might be plenty going on inside its head. So what are your options and how can they benefit your website? Well there’s quite a lot actually! Head Elements Gone Rogue Independent Elements Example: CSS Techniques I Wish I Knew When I Started Designing Websites - Noupe Design Blog. Dec 18 2009 By Tim Wright and TJ Kelly CSS is the best thing to happen to the web since Tim Berners-Lee. It’s simple, powerful, and easy to use. But even with all its simplicity, it hides some important capabilities. All designers at some point in their career go through the process of encountering a weird display issue, searching for a resolution, and discovering a trick, technique, or hack could have saved them hours of frustration—if they had only known when they started.
We’ve put together a list of the most frustrating and time-consuming CSS headaches and, more importantly, their solutions (along with examples and further resources). Resets & Browser Inconsistencies Not all browsers are created equal. The early stages of resets, designers dealt with differing margin and padding values, using a global reset: inputbuttonhr These elements were excluded because their cross-browser differences are so vast that you would have to completely unstyle them to create a "bulletproof" element.
<! FARY is a Free CSS Form Builder. Don’t know CSS but would like to create a pretty looking form for content submission? Well, checkout FAARY, its a free to use, CSS Form Builder.With FAARY, you only need to enter the type of HTML fields (for eg, textbox, textarea etc..,) which are required in the form and FAARY does the rest of the work of creating a beautiful CSS ready form for you. Getting started is pretty simple, simply follow the steps listed 1.) Navigate your browser to FAARY ( 2.) On the left side of this screen, there is textarea – just fill what form elements do you need – each in new line. You can use links which are below to add sample elements automatically. 3.) 4.) 12 Common CSS Mistakes Web Developers Make.
Let’s get real for a second here. As far as web languages go, CSS is arguably the simplest. I mean, really, what could be easier than a simple list of properties affecting an element? And the syntax is almost like written English. Want to change the font size? There’s a font-size CSS property. But despite its deceptively easy exterior, CSS is one complicated system, especially when you’re doing it in a professional, high-scale, high-performance level.
It’s easy to get tripped up with CSS. 1. Web browsers are our fickle friends. One of the sillier things browsers do is provide default styling for HTML elements. In any case, there’s rarely a case of two browsers providing identical default styling, so the only real way to make sure your styles are effective is to use a CSS reset. What a CSS reset entails is resetting (or, rather, setting) all the styles of all the HTML elements to a predictable baseline value. Though this works, it’s not a full reset. 2. Ul#navigation li a { ... } 3. 4. A Collection of PSD to Html Conversion Tutorials. More and more designers are into creating their own blogs and websites either to showcase their works or to advertise. At this pace, it is quite important that as designers who are interested in blogging, one should learn the basics in PSD to HTML, turning Photoshop designs into HTML format.
If you are equipped with this technique, you will be able to simply turn your designs into codes that are good enough to turn into active blogs or sites. This new post is a compilation of tutorials on converting PSD into HTML. Learn the basics of this technique to apply them to your designs and be one-step ahead from the rest… Enjoy!!! You may want to take a look at the following related articles: • A Collection of Photoblog and Gallery WordPress Themes • 45 Free WordPress Themes with Appealing Designs • 40 First-Class Premium Magazine Style WordPress Themes • 33 Newly Fresh Web Design Layout Tutorials Coding a Band Website Created in Photoshop Converting a Design From PSD to HTML From Photoshop to HTML. Why You Need to Know HTML/CSS. Last week I posted an article entitled “5 Skills Every Bloggers Needs to Excel” spelling out five skills that I consider essential for every blogger to either have or be willing to obtain if they want to truly excel.
Overall, the article was well-received but several commenters took issue with the second item on my list: HTML/CSS Skills. Several felt that the power of WordPress/Blogger and other blogging platforms made the need to know HTML obsolete. Others pointed out, correctly, that you can outsource much of this work if you’re willing to pay. That being said, there’s still no substitute for having at least some basic HTML skills in your mental toolbox. You don’t have to be a virtuoso, but you need to be able to customize your blog and fix any mistakes or you will find yourself at a severe disadvantage. If you don’t see the need, consider the problems not knowing HTML/CSS raises, especially down the road.
Theme Are Not Enough Maintenance Bad Things Happens And things do go wrong. PSD/HTML Conversion: Elegant and Simple CSS3 Web Layout. This is Part 2 of tutorial series. The first part dealt with creating a web design mockup of an elegant and simple blog web design. You should do Part 1 before attempting this tutorial so that you to gain the most benefit. Elegant and Simple Blog Web Layout Tutorial Series This tutorial is the second part of a two-part tutorial series. This part (Part 2) will show you how to create an HTML/CSS web template for the PSD design created in Part 1. Final Result Click on the final result preview below to see a live demo. View Demo Create the Basic Files 1 The first thing we’ll do is set up the files and folders. 2 Create 2 folders inside the letterpress folder and name them images and styles. 3 Open up your favorite HTML/CSS editor (such as Dreamweaver or Notepad++) and create an HTML document. 4 Create a stylesheet document and name it style.css (or any other name you want).
Basic HTML 5 The code below goes in index.html. <! Slice the Bookmark from the PSD Write the HTML Markup Container Navigation Bar. Learn HTML and CSS: An Absolute Beginner’s Guide. This article was written in 2009 and remains one of our most popular posts. If you’re keen to learn more about HTML and CSS, you may find this recent article on the future of HTML of great interest. So, you’re ready to take the plunge and begin to learn how to build your own web pages and sites? Fantastic! We’ve got quite a ride ahead, so I hope you’re feeling adventurous. This information is an excerpt from my recently released book, Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way Using HTML & CSS, 2nd edition. In the following pages, I’ll show you how to set up your computer — be it PC or Mac — so that you’re ready to build a site. Then, we’ll meet XHTML and walk through the details of how to structure a web page correctly.
Finally, we’ll turn to the topic of Cascading Style Sheets, which we’ll use to change the way elements of your web page look. Don’t worry if some of these terms are unfamiliar — this excerpt, like the book itself, assumes that you have no knowledge about building web pages. Web page production using HTML, Graphics, CSS and Javascript. Understanding The Basics Of CSS3.
Cascading Style Sheets, commonly known as CSS, has been around for sometime now allowing us to create much more powerful and flexible websites than in the past. Now that CSS has evolved a bit and the acceptance of CSS3 is making its way to our favorite browsers, we can begin to play around with some of the newer features available. In this article I will focus on some of the more popular features of CSS3, many of which are beginning to make their appearance on several of the websites that I frequently visit. While most of these are only visible in some of the more modern web browsers (Mozilla, Chrome, Safari) it’s important to go ahead and get a grasp of exactly how they work. Border Radius Creating rounded corners in web design wasn’t always the easiest of things to accomplish. Equal Corners Keep all of those corners symmetrical with just a few short keystrokes. The Code: -webkit-border-radius: 10px; -moz-border-radius: 10px; border-radius: 10px; Unequal Corners Box Shadow Text Shadow Gradients.
CSS Panic Guide. This is not a complete resource, this is a fast resource. These are the sites that I refer to first, and that I tell people to read. When you want more, just about all of them have their own links to good sites. Basics NYPL Style Guide. Source Communicate CSS-Discuss. Regular Reads A List Apart. Browsers Our browsers suck. Layout Boxes This has perhaps the steepest learning curve for people converting to CSS.
Mike explains how it should work.Eric, Rob, and I offer methods suited to our lovely browsers. Validate Text Size Setting text size smaller than default can cause nasty things to happen in IE PC's resizing method. Accessibility Access is not about adding wheelchair ramps to existing pages. Why are you just writing for the screen? There seems to be little developer-targeted info on the using the other media types yet. All - Suitable for all devices. 25 HTML5 Features, Tips, and Techniques you Must Know. How to: CSS Large Background. Since I posted the huge collection of Large Background Websites, I received several email requests on how to make a large background site with CSS.
So, I thought it would be a good idea to share my techniques on designing large background websites. In this tutorial, I will provide various CSS examples on how you can create a large background site using either a single or double images. Common Mistake: Background Gets Cropped (see demo) Take a look at the demo file, it looks fine under 1280px. But if you have a high resolution display, you will see the background gets cut off on the sides.
Example #1: Single Image (see demo) A quick solution to fix the problem mentioned earlier: make the edge of the image the same color as the BODY background color. CSS Part The CSS part is very simple. Here is the CSS code: Notice there are two extra lines in the BODY selector. Example #2: Double Images (see demo) For this example, I'm going to use the job board design, Design Jobs on the Wall. 21 Amazing CSS Techniques You Should Know. Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) is one of the building blocks of modern web design without which websites would have been ugly just like they were a decade ago. With time, the quality of CSS tutorials out there on the web has increased considerably. Here are 21 amazing CSS Techniques that you might not have thought could be done by CSS. 1.
Cross Browser CSS SlideShow Amazing demonstration of how to create a cross browser image gallery using just CSS. 2. This tutorial demonstrates a crazy way to create an image map using just CSS. 3. Create a lighbox using just CSS with no JavaScript required. 4. Replace the submit buttons with images using CSS, degrades back to submit button if CSS is disabled. 5. Amazing tutorial on how to create an animated navigation menu using just CSS. 6. Create a tree like navigation from nested lists of links. 7. Create eye-catching titles with nice gradient effect using just CSS. 8. 9. Amazing way to create a liquid layout using negative margins 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 7 Awesome CSS3 Techniques You Can Start Using Right Now.
Ask Anna: Huge Comment Numbers? — ABDPBT Tech. 5 Good Habits That Will Make You a Better Coder.