As a user, don’t you hate it when you click a button, only to realize that the resulting action really isn’t what you wanted at all? Sometimes this is a minor annoyance and sometimes it’s a complete disaster that ruins hours or even days of work.
As a designer, it’s up to you to help your users avoid these tragic mistakes whenever possible. Today we’ll look at some methods that you can use to achieve this goal.
If you follow Chris Coyier on Twitter, then you have no doubt seen quite a few mentions go by in recent months of a not so secret project called CodePen. Chris promised us that this new tool would join the ranks of jsFiddle and Tinkerbin, serving as a sort of online playground to experiment with and share CSS, HTML and JavaScript demos.
Like a kid in December anxiously awaiting Christmas day, I’ve been dying to see what Chris and his team would come up with. Fortunately, Christmas has arrived. CodePen is a live project and I can’t wait to tell you all about it.
Adobe has an interesting relationship with folks who design websites. Photoshop and Fireworks have you covered from a static image perspective, but tools to build live, functioning websites are another story completely. Flash is no longer the poster child of modern web technologies (quite the opposite), GoLive went the way of the dinosaurs and Dreamweaver, though still widely used, is regarded by many to be a bloated mess.
One area that Adobe is intent on pursuing is web design for non-coders. They’ve made it their mission to bring the world of professional website creation to the huge market of designers who can’t write a lick of code. Thus far, they’ve largely fallen short of that goal (Project Rome anyone?). Their latest attempt, Adobe Muse, has finally exited beta and is available as a part of Adobe’s new Creative Cloud service ($50 per month) or as a stand alone product ($15 per month). Is Muse worth your time and money? Will it really allow you to create professional level websites without coding? Read on to find out.
Today we’re going to embark on the challenge of creating an animated banner of photos that automatically scrolls horizontally through an infinite loop. The best part: we’re going to do it without a single line of JavaScript.
To make this banner truly useful, our goal will be to use individual photos dropped into our HTML, not simply one long CSS background that repeats. This is pretty tricky but we’ll walk you through exactly how it works. Let’s get started!
Apple is pushing the tech industry forward by increasing the pixel density on iPhone and iPad screens. This is great from a user’s perspective, but as a web designer or developer it literally threatens to completely change the way you build websites.
Are you ready for HD web design? Do you know how your sites will look on a new generation of high resolution screens? What steps can you take to prepare yourself and what skills will you need to stay relevant in the years to come? Read on to find out.
Today we’re going to see if we can take a single image inserted via HTML and make it look like a messy stack of images using only CSS. The key: pseudo elements.
Along the way we’ll see how embarking on a project like this can quickly lead to some messy code and how we can combat that with some awesome DRY coding practices.
I love finding free tools that are capable of making my job (and yours) just a little bit easier. The web developer community is positively overflowing with talented people who are more than willing to share their creations with the world while asking nothing in return.
Today we’re going to look at one such tool from Erskine Design called Gridpak. With it we can quickly and easily generate our own responsive grid for building web pages that work well on lots of different screen sizes. It’s a little tricky to implement though so we’ll help you figure out how to set up your styles after you grab the download.
Working with multiple photos and images can be a tricky prospect. Done carefully, the use of multiple images can help create an effective and masterful design for both print and web design projects. Some of the best examples of design using multiple photos can be found in the websites of professional photographers.
Consider dominance, number of photos, color, grouping and image quality when working with a variety of photos. Look at details and consider the feel of a project to get the best results when using many images in your project.
I was recently discussing the merits and various features of CSS preprocessors with a colleague. We covered all of the basics: how it’s great to have variables and how mixins can save you an incredible amount of coding time. When the conversation turned to some of the more obscure features though things got interesting. When I brought up the various color operations, my colleague boldly proclaimed that no “real designer” could ever find a legitimate excuse for using this feature and not picking his own colors manually.
In the words of Barney Stinson, “challenge accepted!” Today we’re going to create an awesome faux 3D text effect with pure CSS and then see why it’s a lot easier to do it with the color operations in Sass or LESS.
The other day a friend of mine said something that caught my attention, “I’m trying to learn how to slice a PSD.” It’s a simple enough statement. As soon as he said it, I knew exactly what he was talking about, and yet, there was something in there that didn’t quite set right.
Upon seeing my hesitation my friend responded with a question, “Do we still slice PSDs?” Great question! For beginners, jargon isn’t merely jargon, it implies a process and suggests a method of action. For this reason, it’s often helpful for more advanced developers to define their terms in a way that is meaningful to others. Today we’ll dive into the theory behind the process of converting a PSD to to a web page and end with a discussion on the ups and downs of designing in the browser.
Building a website can come with a few unexpected hiccups, one of those being color. Understanding color choices, and how colors may render on different computers is the first step to ensuring that your site has the look you intended.
In addition to finding and selecting colors that work for you, it is wise to develop and manage a color scheme for your project. It is simple to create a set of swatches in common image software such as Adobe’s Photoshop or Illustrator and organize colors in such a way that they are easy to find and use.
Once upon a time we relied purely on Photoshop to create fancy image effects. These days though we’re turning more and more to pure CSS to add eye candy to our images. Applying custom image treatments using code makes for an infinitely flexible workflow that’s easy to tweak at any time.
Today I’ll walk you through creating some extremely simple and fun CSS image tricks. From polaroids to vignettes, you won’t believe what we can pull off.