Every time I go to design a new site I jump directly into PhotoShop because, well, it's the tool I've used since the very first site I designed as a professional. I know it very well and can move quickly and efficiently.
Ever wish that you could create high fidelity design mock-ups with the ability to make global color changes? Well, with Illustrator you can do exactly that.
Getting tired of those ugly old school WYSIWYG editors that have every setting under the sun? I know I am. Well, there are some other great solutions out there and jQuery Notebook is one of them.
Modular is the new black when speaking in terms of the web. From the back-end perspective, developers have been building modular, object-oriented code for a long time now. Well, as web technologies and our development processes continue to improve, more and more of these back-end, programmatic philosophies are finding their way into front-end development.
You can now place PhotoShop documents within other PhotoShop documents. This is awesome when you are in the process of mocking up large scale applications consisting of common components like site headers, footers, navigation, etc. It also helps to keep these design elements consistent when developing with a team of designers.
Media queries are great and they have become the standard for responsive web design. They provide us the ability take control of our designs and dramatically change the way they look across a wide array of view port dimensions and devices. They are not without issues however. They are are only concerned with the width of the view port and not the width of containing elements.
For the longest time the only pseudo selectors that we could use were :link, :hover, :visited and :active and they could only be applied to a tags. As long as we were intending to support ie6 that was all we could do. As we've adopted philosophies like progressive enhancement, graceful degradation, or dropped support for ie6, 7, and 8 we have seen the landscape of CSS selectors change dramatically.
The HTML5 mark tag was created in order to highlight text within a document that is relative to another context. This is perfect for highlighting the search term in a list of results.
I don't really come across much about the use of CSS3 cubic-bezier() functions for easing in animations. It is a timing function that can be used in place of the easing keyword for CSS animations.
Kerning is a very important aspect when it comes to setting type. Unfortunately, until more recent times, it has been left out when it comes to the web.
Have you ever wanted to automatically place the cursor in a field when the page is rendered? I know I have.
Looking for high quality pictures to use in your personal or commercial projects? Don't want to pay tons of cash for overused stock photos? Well, you're in luck thanks to [Ryan McGuire](http://www.laughandpee.com/) from [Bells Design](http://www.bellsdesign.com/).
After writing my post Use CSS Calc to Properly Position Background Images I had some folks point out that you can now use the new Four-Value syntax for the background-position property to achieve the same effect. I was absolutely blown away when I saw that this was finally possible. I'm mean, this just makes sense and it's something that I've wanted for years.
www.fontwalk.de is a site that was created as a marketing tool for www.fontshop.com. I'm not so interested in their fonts, although it looks like they have a nice selection. I am more interested in the great design ideas behind the Font Walk site.
Often I've found myself in a spot where I've needed to style an ordered list in a way that I just couldn't do with CSS. So I either had to live with it as it was or get tricky with JavaScript or something to create a custom list with the necessary markup. Then I stumbled across CSS Counters and that all changed.
Ever needed to use small caps in a website? They can add a really nice typographic touch in certain circumstances, but I've never really taken advantage of them with CSS.
Navigation can be a hard thing to master. Handling it intuitively and in a usable fashion is even more challenging with the wide variety of devices and screen resolutions available. Most sites tend to just shove all of their menu items under some three bar icon and expand the menu when clicked. Seems to work pretty well, but what If your were to think of navigation in a whole new way?
The CSS Clip property is an odd one. I've been building websites for a long time and didn't know about it even though it's been around for a while. In this article I am going to explore how and why to use the CSS Clip property.
CSS drop caps came up in a discussion with a co-worker the other day. I don't use drop caps in web sites I design, but there's really no reason why I shouldn't.