If you are an artist, you can do anything you want. It’s perfectly all right. Design serves a different purpose. If in the process of solving a problem you create a problem, obviously, you didn’t design.
—Massimo Vignelli
You likely use css backgrounds in every site you build. You give an element a background color and tell another element to let a background image repeat. How much do you know about all the other background properties?
Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, to be able to get the best of both, to make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but also have them be intuitive, easy to use, fun to use, so that they really fit the users — the users don’t have to come to them, they come to the user.
— Steve Jobs
A few weeks ago I offered some tips for setting up a baseline grid. In a comment Raul wondered why most articles about baseline grids focused on textual elements while not mentioning non-textual elements such as forms.
Read the rest of this entry »
Mention css and tables in the same sentence and controversy is sure to follow. Web designers like myself have been telling you not to use html tables for layouts and now here we have a way to create tables with css alone.
Read the rest of this entry »
If you’re a big news media site or an up-and-coming blog, at some point you are going to sit down and really consider what type of comment system is best for your site.
Read the rest of this entry »
A few months ago I posted about 4 different types of grids common in design — the manuscript grid, the column grid, the modular grid, and the hierarchical grid.
Read the rest of this entry »
A few weeks ago I received an email from Pedro Reis asking if I would write a post about the css display property. I thought it would make for an interesting topic as the display property sits at the heart of a lot of what we do in css layouts.
Read the rest of this entry »
For the last few weeks I’ve been looking at different css selector patterns. One thing I haven’t mention is the efficiency of the selectors, something Chad commented about on the very first post in the series.
Read the rest of this entry »
When people talk about typographic grids it often revolves around the horizontal and aligning elements to columns of precise widths. The vertical gets slighted at times due to the dynamic heights of web pages.
However, we shouldn’t ignore the vertical. We should set the vertical to a baseline grid.
Read the rest of this entry »
