David Appleyard helps to build fun things for the design community, including Design Shack, Creative VIP, and Themelantic.
Believe it our not, your office environment as a designer can have a huge impact on the quality of work produced. Whether it’s in a cluttered office, a contemporary apartment, or even a caravan; the standard of your design creations (even your CSS code!) can really be impacted by the surrounding. This article will take a look at some inspiring workplaces, desks and gadgets to give you a few ideas.
Multiple columns are a major facet of laying out text – newspapers have used them for decades. So important are they that it is amazing that the current way to achieve a multi column layout is one of the most complex techniques for a new designer to grasp.
The RSS feed icon has become somewhat iconic in web design, and is arguably one of the most recognized symbols. This great article has a huge collection of RSS feed icons – from a photorealistic style as shown here, to small buttons to hand-drawn sketches.
This tutorial will be taking a look at some of the new ways you can manipulate user interface features in CSS3. But what do we mean by “user interface”?
CSS3 brings some great new properties relating to resizing elements, cursors, outlining, box layout and more. We’re focusing on three of the most significant user interface enhancements in this tutorial.
Most designers are familiar with the relative pros and cons of different publishing tools – but what about the websites of the blog platforms themselves? We all know that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I would argue that there’s no harm in looking…
We’re going to take a look at the homepage for four popular platforms: WordPress, Textpattern, ExpressionEngine and Blogger. Which ones are beautiful enough to compel you to use their platform, and which ones have the design aesthetic of a hello kitty toaster? Hopefully through a critique of these designs you can take home some good pointers for use in your own work.
The third part in this series on CSS3 will be delving into the new text effects. Typography is, without any doubt, one of the most important aspects to get right when designing a layout. Type can draw the reader through a page, give a certain impression, provide impact, be subtle, or aid in separating content.
CSS is already reasonably versatile in the way in which text can be displayed, but still constricts design in quite a few areas. CSS3 goes some way towards removing those limitations.
Silverback is a new app which lets you run your own usability tests really easily. It looks set to be a great new tool for designers who want to analyze how users interact with their site. After a recent request for beta testers, a few interesting details are emerging.
Once again, thank you to everyone who entered our competition and filled out the survey. We have randomly selected a winner and the proud recipient of a new CSSEdit 2.6 copy is Domantas Jankauskas. Congratulations!
If you are interested in the outcome of the survey, please feel free to read on. We’ll be discussing some of your responses and how Design Shack has changed as a result.
For the next few hours, the blog network 9rules have opened their doors to website submissions. They run a high quality network of sites and provide a central way to access all their content. Members includes sites such as Smashing Magazine, CSS Globe and PSDTuts.
For the second part of our series on CSS3, we’ll be taking a look at borders. Everyone who uses CSS is familiar with the border property – it’s a great way to structure content, create effects around images and improve page layout.
CSS3 takes borders to a new level with the ability to use gradients, rounded corners, shadows and border images. We are going to look at each of these in a bit more detail, using examples where possible.
A few of our kind readers wouldn’t stop pestering us…! All updates to the CSS gallery and news will now be sent to Twitter, providing another yet another way to subscribe to Design Shack.
This article marks the first of several, providing an introduction to the new CSS3 standard which is set to take over from CSS2. We will be starting from the very beginning – taking you from not having even heard of CSS3, to feeling ready to hit it running as various features start to become more widely adopted.