1. Authors
  2. David Appleyard

David Appleyard

David Appleyard

David Appleyard helps to build fun things for the design community, including Design Shack, Theme Junkie, Creative VIP, and Themelantic.

Articles / 19 Mar 2008

Developer Tools in Safari

Open the safari preferences window, click on the ‘advanced’ option and then select the box entitled ‘Show develop menu in menu bar’. Straight forward! The result is a new field in the top menu which looks like the following:

Articles / 12 Mar 2008

10 CSS Form Examples

Forms can be greatly enhanced with a touch of CSS, making them more usable and far more visually attractive. Follow some of the examples below and you’ll be creating stunning CSS forms in no time at all.

Accessibility / 7 Mar 2008

Cross Browser Testing (PC)

A sure sign of a rock solid, well coded CSS layout is that it displays consistently across browsers and platforms. A look at recent global browser stats shows that, while Internet Explorer continues to be the most popular web browser in general use, its user base is fairly evenly split between versions 6 and 7.

And although other browsers such as Firefox, Opera and Safari have a relatively small share of the browser market, it would be unwise for any web designer or developer to ignore them when testing their work.

Articles / 4 Mar 2008

One Thousand Designs

We today passed the mark of 1000 CSS designs featured in our gallery. Thank you to all those who keep submitting their websites and to our loyal readers looking for inspiration. Here’s to hitting the 2000 mark next year!

Articles / 14 Feb 2008

Happy Valentines!

In the spirit of love, we have a gift for all our readers in the form of a 10% discount on any purchase from Markup4U. Simply enter ‘Design Shack’ in the notes section of your order to receive the discount, which will run until the end of February.

Happy Valentines from Design Shack!

Articles / 18 Jan 2008

CSSEdit Tutorial: The Basics

CSSEdit is, as the name implies, a CSS editor for the Mac. It has come on leaps and bounds in the latest version and is now one of the best apps available on the Mac for designers. CSSEdit is created by the great delopers over at MacRabbit, who are also responsible for DeskShade.

One of the strongest features of CSSEdit is the simple, easy to navigate and beautiful interface. Even people who have no experience in styling web pages can find their way around this amazing app and create some stunning web pages. In this tutorial we’re going to be looking at the interface and how to get the most out of it.

Articles / 17 Jan 2008

Creating an iPhone Website Icon

With the latest software update to the iPhone, it is now possible to add ‘WebClips’ to your home screen. This is essentially a quick bookmark to a website, complete with an icon. By default, the iPhone will take a tiny screenshot of the site to use as an icon – with a little work however, you can customize the icon used to make it look just as you’d like.

Articles / 9 Sep 2007

Search Forms in Safari

Search fields in SafariIt is remarkably simple to put this design feature in place on your site, and it can improve functionality greatly for those using a Mac. Whether Firefox and Internet Explorer will integrate this feature into their browsers in the future is unknown – although it is fairly unlikely.

Articles / 4 Sep 2007

GenoPal 3.0 for Mac Review

GenoPal Colour SoftwareYou start by selecting a colour. This can be done either through a colour palette, or through an eyedropper tool which allows you to sample a colour from anywhere on the screen – really useful. The software then generates a whole selection of colours based on the one you chose. Two sliders allow you to alter the colour diversity and lightness diversity, so you can select complementary or contrasting colour comparisons.

Articles / 30 Aug 2007

10 CSS Table Examples

Today we’re going to take a look at a selection of beautiful tables styled using CSS. These are sourced from a variety of different sites. If you’re interested in learning how to do this yourself, be sure to take a look at a few of our CSS tutorials!

Articles / 29 Aug 2007

Free CSS Layout Templates

Free CSS Layouts and TemplatesWhen designing a new website, having a template to work from can save a huge amount of time. We have a collection of 12 great CSS templates to base your design on, both fixed and fluid layouts. These free CSS templates are designed by Mitch Bryson, and provided for you with his permission.