Elastic Design It can be difficult to move from a static, pixel-based design approach to an elastic, relative method. Properly implemented, however, elastic design can be a viable option that enhances usability and accessibility without mandating design sacrifices. A pixel is an unscalable dot on a computer screen, whereas an em is a square of its font size. It is perhaps easier to adopt a print-like, static approach to design because there is less to think about when dimensions don’t change. You may want your website to display in a specific way, but your users may want it another way. To understand how Elastic Design works, we must first take another look at a subject that would seem to be played out: namely, different methods of text sizing. Elastic text#section1 Text is the most obvious candiate for elasticity. Accessibility isn’t all about blindness and screen readers. The problem with ems#section2 Ems would appear to be the unit of choice when it comes to relative text sizing. For example:
Dave Woods - HTML, CSS, Web Design » 100% Height Layout Using CSS CSS layouts don’t have to be complicated but sometimes the things that should be simple and easy to do seem impossible at first. Within this tutorial, I’ll explain how 100% height can be achieved cross browser, using CSS. Here’s a very simple example of what this tutorial will create but it can also be used in much more sophisticated and complicated layouts. 100% Height Layout Using CSS I’ll dive straight in with this tutorial and start off with some very simple HTML code: <! This will create a page with a heading and paragraph and should be simple enough so far. Next, we can start adding some styling information to the page with some font styling and basic spacing using CSS. Again this should be fairly simple and cause no problems in any of the major browsers. Now, lets imagine that we want to make the main content fill 700px of the page, including 2px border on each side and add a background colour which takes up 100% of the browser space. The Complete Code And that’s all there is to it.
Website Planning Overview When you decide to have a website for your business or personal interest there are a number of things you have to consider before you start actually building your website. Website planning has various steps: Purpose of Website Why are your building this site? As you can see, website planning has a number of steps to go through before actually building the website. Start today buy determing the purpose of the website. Pros And Cons Of 6 CSS Layout Patterns: Part 2 Last time we began talking about some different css layout patterns. We looked at fixed-width, fluid/liquid, elastic, and hybrid designs. Today we’ll look at the 2 layouts we didn’t include last time, responsive, and fluid/elastic grids. I’ll then offer some additional thoughts about which layout you might choose for a project. 6 CSS Layouts As a reminder and to once again make sure we’re talking about the same thing, here are the quick definitions for each layout. Fixed-Width — Overall width is fixed with absolute measurements (px). Responsive Layouts The idea behind responsive layouts is to have the design respond to various conditions that your visitor controls. In order to develop a responsive layout you need to use either browser detection or media queries to serve different stylesheets to different device, browser, or screen resolution. Pros: Cons: Responsive design really goes further than layout alone. Fluid/Elastic Grids Thoughts About Which Layout To Use Which layout should you use?
Step by step CSS float tutorial Floatutorial takes you through the basics of floating elements such as images, drop caps, next and back buttons, image galleries, inline lists and multi-column layouts. General info Tutorial 1. Floating an image to the right Float an image to the right of a block of text and apply a border to the image. Tutorial 2. Float an image and caption to the right of a block of text and apply borders using Descendant Selectors. Tutorial 3. Float a series of images down the right side of the page, with content flowing beside them. Tutorial 4. Float a series of thumbnail images and captions to achieve an image gallery. Tutorial 5. Float a simple list into rollover "back" and next "buttons". Tutorial 6. Float a simple list, converting it into a horizontal navigation bar. Tutorial 7. Float a scaleable drop cap to the left, resize it and adjust line-heights to suit your needs. Tutorial 8. Float a left nav to achieve a two column layout with header and footer. Tutorial 9.
Custom Web Design vs Website Templates As a business owner you are always looking how to save money and make your business profitable. When it comes to creating an online presence for your business, just like your marketing materials and office’s appearance, your website needs to project a professional image. The more professional looking your business appears, the more creditable it looks. Many business owners don’t really understand the difference between having a custom web design done and using website templates. Custom Web Design Many think having a custom web design is too expensive but let’s look at the advantages of hiring a web designer over using a free website template or purchasing one. Benefits of custom web design: Unique design. Other points to take into consideration when deciding if custom web design is for you are: Are you planning to maintain the website yourself? Another idea if considering a custom web design is, just have a template made incorporating the website theme. Website Templates What's next?
Pros And Cons Of 6 CSS Layout Patterns: Part 1 There are a number of css layout patterns you can use when developing a website. Your design could be of fixed-width or it could be fluid or elastic. It might even be a hybrid layout or be responsive to different devices. What are the pros and cons of some of the common css layouts available to us? Are some layouts preferred over others?Note: While you can’t always tell from the screenshots throughout this post I’ve tried to match the screenshot with the layout described below it. 6 CSS Layouts You’re likely familiar with all of the css layouts below, but to make sure we’re on the same page, let’s quickly define each. Fixed-Width — Overall width is fixed with absolute measurements (px). Pay attention to the difference between fluid/liquid layouts and elastic layouts. The difference is that fluid layouts are measured relative to something external to the design (browser window), while elastic layouts are measured relative to something internal to the design (font-size). Fixed-Width Layouts
Griglie fluide | Articoli Css | Css.HTML.it Mentre prima abbiamo calcolato percentuali relative alla larghezza di 998px dell’elemento #page, ora stiamo lavorando nel contesto di .entry .content, che è più piccolo. Come risultato, dobbiamo ridefinire il nostro contesto e lavorare sulla larghezza di .entry .content come punto di riferimento. Così, per definire la larghezza in percentuale dell’area del post, prendiamo la larghezza di 700px e la dividiamo per 844px: Per la colonna di 124px sulla destra, possiamo usare lo stesso punto di riferimento: Possiamo ora prendere le misure risultanti e inserirle nel CSS: Così abbiamo portato a termine il nostro lavoro (esempio). Una nota sull’arrotondamento Come potete intuire dalla mancanza di hack particolari, ho avuto pochi problemi di compatibilità cross-browser con questa tecnica. Se state lavorando con margini sufficienti nella vostra griglia, ciò non dovrebbe costituire un problema. a Una griglia per tutte le stagioni Letture
How To Design a Website – The Steps to Designing a Website As with most design projects, the first step when creating a website is to perform research. Some of this research will be done with the client to get an understanding of their needs, and other research will be done to learn more about a specific industry. When meeting with your client, you’ll be looking to discover as much as possible to help you develop an outline for the site and eventually design it. This includes asking about their target audience, goals, creative direction and other variables that may affect what you can offer the client, such as budget and deadline. What to Ask Clients
Fluid Grids Early last year, I worked on the redesign of a rather content-heavy website. Design requirements were fairly light: the client asked us to keep the organization’s existing logo and to improve the dense typography and increase legibility. So, early on in the design process, we spent a sizable amount of time planning a well-defined grid for a library of content modules. Article Continues Below Over the past few years, this sort of thinking has become more common. However, our client had one last, heart-stopping requirement: the design had to be fluid and resize with the browser window. Minimum screen resolution: a little white lie#section1 Instead of exploring the benefits of flexible web design, we rely on a little white lie: “minimum screen resolution.” Of course, when I was coding the site, I didn’t have the luxury of writing a diatribe on the evils of fixed-width design. As it turns out, it’s simply a matter of context. Do I really have to thank IE for this? With ems, it’s easily done.
Adaptive CSS-Layouts: New Era In Fluid Layouts? | CSS Advertisement Fluid web designs have many benefits, but only if implemented correctly. With proper technique, a design can be seen correctly on large screens, small screens and even tiny PDA screens. With bad coding structure, however, a fluid layout can be disastrous. If you as a designer are going to go through all the extra work of creating a functional fluid layout, why not go a bit further and make it compatible with all resolutions, instead of just most? In this article, we’ll discuss effective techniques to create 100%-functional adaptive CSS-layouts, and provide details on other tutorials and practices. Also consider our previous articles: Fixed vs. 1. Most of us have heard of the 960 Grid System for designing fixed-width Web pages. What Is a Fluid Grid? A fluid grid can be created through a smart use of DIV layers, percentages and very simple math. The Benefits How to Create a Fluid Grid Layout Everything’s fine until we start thinking about usability. A Note About Margins 2. 3. 5.
The Best Alternative Apps to Everything in Adobe Creative Cloud It’d be hard to be a creative professional and not have heard the drama around Adobe’s move to subscriptions with Creative Cloud‘s release. We’ve covered the good and bad of the move to subscriptions, and even wrote an Open Letter to Adobe about the changes. Creative Cloud has many good things — it’s even cheaper than buying Master Collection and upgrading every time — and the upgraded apps have a lot of nice new features. There’s even the value-add of font and file sync. But, if you want to own your apps, or not have to pay for upgrades and new features you don’t want, though, it’s hard to see the upside to Adobe’s new move to a subscription-only system. The good thing is, Adobe’s got more competition for its apps than ever before, especially on the Mac. Photoshop Photoshop — the app name that became a verb, much to Adobe’s chagrin — is to graphics editing what Microsoft Word is to document editing. Pixelmator Price: $14.99 from the Mac App Store, free trial available Acorn 4 Illustrator
How To Develop Elastic Grid Layouts In CSS Flexible layouts are created by using relative measurements as opposed to absolute measurements. The question is relative to what? With elastic layouts the measurements are set relative to something internal to the design, usually the size of the type. We previously talked about fluid layouts, which I defined as using measurements relative to the browser window. Before getting to the code let me say the definitions above aren’t necessarily used by all. Flexible layout — any layout that uses relative measurements to allow the layout to resize under different conditionsFluid layouts — layouts with measurements relative to the browser windowElastic layouts — layouts with measurements relative to something internal to the design such as the size of the type Both fluid and elastic layouts are flexible. As always if you prefer to skip the explanations below and jump right to the code you can view the demo layouts here. The HTML You can alternately use the body tag as the container. The CSS
Pixels to Ems Conversion Table for CSS A companion reference to the article, The Incredible Em and Elastic Layouts With CSS. The em values in the table assume that the generic browser default setting of 16px font size has not being changed. It also assumes that the <body> has font size set to 1em or 100%. Formula to calculate em equivalent for any pixel value required 1 ÷ parent font size (px) × required pixels = em equivalent Example: 770px wide, centred elastic layout using CSS and ems N.B. 1 ÷ 16 × 770 = 48.125em <html><body><div> … </div></body></html> *I deliberately hooked the formula for the tutorial around 1px, as a value that designers can easily relate to. Required element pixel value ÷ parent font size in pixels = em value So, our required width of 770px in ems can be calculated like this: