About Us Alternative Style: Working With Alternate Style Sheets So you’ve got a web page. You’ve marked it up with structural XHTML. You’ve also been a good little web developer and used style sheets to control what your document looks like. Article Continues Below Great. Styling your site#section1 Style sheets can be associated with documents using a list of link elements in the head. Persistent#section2 These style sheets are always enabled (they are always “on”) and are combined with the active style sheet. To make the style sheet paul.css persistent, the following link element would be included in the head: Preferred#section3 These style sheets are enabled by default (they are “on” when the page is loaded). To make a style sheet preferred, the rel attribute is set to “stylesheet” and the style sheet is named with the title attribute. Several preferred style sheets can be grouped together by giving them identical title attributes. To make paul.css preferred, a title attribute is added, giving the default style a name. Alternate#section4 Cookies#section7
17 Great Wireframing Tools for Web Designers “Time is of the essence” is a bold statement that definitely applies to any design career. We all get paid by the hour, so the faster we can work, the more money we can make. This means that being able to get up and running on our design work has become a necessity. This is where wireframing comes in. Balsamiq Balsamiq offers low-tech wireframes in the form of sketches so that you focus on content and functionality rather than design and looks. ProtoShare ProtoSahre focuses on collaborative wireframing between a team. Adobe Fireworks Especially with CS6, wireframing and mockups have never become easier. Pencil Pencil is an open source GUI prototyping tool. Axure Axure boasts rapid wireframe and prototype generation, as well as the ability to develop your wireframes and mockups to working prototypes. JumpChart JumpChart is another wireframing tool that boasts the ability to create rapid wireframes and prototypes. JustInMind Prototyper JustProto iPlotz Pidoco Hot Gloo Gliffy WireFrameSketcher MockFlow
6 New Mac Apps for Designers and Developers This series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. Learn more about Rackspace's hosting solutions here. Mac OS X is a popular platform for developers and designers of all stripes. Apple has always had strength in the graphic design market, but even before Apple's shift to Intel processors in 2006, developers started migrating to Mac OS X. Mac OS X is a popular choice because it combines the power of BSD and other UNIX and UNIX-like systems with an elegant user interface. Mac OS X comes with Apache, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Subversion already installed, which makes it easy to turn a factory-fresh Mac into a local test server. There is also a really robust and talented community of developers for Mac OS X, making some of the best apps around for designers and developers alike. As the end of summer approaches, we wanted to highlight six more Mac apps that have been released in the last few month for developers and designers. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Bonus: Courier Your Thoughts?
CSS Gradient Background – Cross Browser! You read that right. This works in: Firefox >=3.6MSIE >=5.5 (!) Oh Em Gee, I’ve got a CSS-applied Gradient. How neat is this? I mean really, this is super cool. And it degrades gracefully in older browsers and Opera. My boss Mike passed this little CSS gem to me, and now dear reader I pass it to you. I’ve condensed Darren’s CSS down to these four lines plus comments, which will give you the lovely Green-to-Black CSS gradient background you can see above. And as you may have guessed by the ‘V’ in the class name, you can also do horizontal gradients – here are some more examples for left-right gradients, and we see what happens when we apply animations to a gradiented DIV. So now we no longer need little 1px slices in the background-image property, just remember to make sure all the colors in each line of CSS match up, and that you choose a nice flat colour fallback that works with your content. As in: Oh boy, when you click on this, you’d better be sitting down. Related Posts:
Web Analytics and Data Driven Marketing | Cardinal Path Welcome to CogTool | CogTool Border-radius: create rounded corners with CSS! Home / CSS3 Previews / Border-radius: create rounded corners with CSS! The CSS3 border-radius property allows web developers to easily utilise rounder corners in their design elements, without the need for corner images or the use of multiple div tags, and is perhaps one of the most talked about aspects of CSS3. Since first being announced in 2005 the boder-radius property has come to enjoy widespread browser support (although with some discrepancies) and, with relative ease of use, web developers have been quick to make the most of this emerging technology. Here’s a basic example: This box should have a rounded corners for Firefox, Safari/Chrome, Opera and IE9. The code for this example is, in theory, quite simple: However, for the moment, you’ll also need to use the -moz- prefix to support Firefox (see the browser support section of this article for further details): How it Works border-bottom-left-radius, border-bottom-right-radius, border-top-left-radius, border-top-right-radius The Syntax:
visualizing.org: a New Shared and Free Resource on Data Visualization Visualizing [visualizing.org] has just been released as the latest online player in the ever-increasing blogosphere about the topic of data visualization. But Visualizing is different in many ways. For one, the man behind the Visualizing initiative is Adam Bly, founder and Editor-in-Chief of Seed and one of the people behind the impressive Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition at MoMA. Together with the fact that Visualizing is also supported by a wide range of highly reputable design institutions, the website positions itself as the most serious media player in the field of data visualization, enjoying an unseen amount of credibility and financial funding. While Visualizing.org's mission is to help make data visualization figure more prominently across the web as a way of understanding complex world issues as they unfold, it is not a weblog in the classic sense. The website has just been launched and it officially still in beta, but many more features are planned.
60 Clean and Minimal Websites for Inspiration During the last few months we have looked at using negative space and minimalist design. Today we bring you 60 of the best-looking minimalistic sites currently on the world wide web. Sit back and get inspired… Minimal Design Keeping things simple is the whole purpose of minimal design. Why overcomplicate what's already a very full web with thousands more links and buttons?! Some of the sites have gone completely minimal without any effects apart from well laid out content, where as others choose to display the huge amount of content with sliders, drop downs and some very uniquely designed objects. Minimal design is actually a lot more difficult to achieve than you might think; keeping your designs clean but bursting with important information is a fine balance. 1: TouchTech Top feature: I love the color scheme, but the way the circles pop out from the cloud on loading the site is really funky. 2: Weltunit Top feature: Well displayed products make this site straight to the point. 3: Polar Gold
Apple Opens Up iAd Creation to the Masses In an indication that the company will no longer be so tight-fisted about control of its iAd creation, Apple today rolled out iAd Producer, a free desktop app that lets third parties make iAds. iAd Producer "makes it easy for you to design and assemble high-impact, interactive content for iAd," the company writes on its Apple Developer page, adding that the app "automatically manages the HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript" behind iAds. By making the creation of iAds available via a graphic user interface, the app effectively removes the need for advanced development acumen. Apple introduced the iAd platform in April with the goal of changing the face and quality of advertising. Since then, Apple has been very restrictive about who can use iAd. According to a report published earlier this year, Apple charged between $1 million and $10 mililion to the likes of Nissan and Disney to use the platform.