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.
Anyone who's ever had to create HTML emails knows that it sucks. You have to write old, crappy, code and inline style everything. You have to use tables because more modern float layouts just don't work consistently across the bagillion email clients that are out there. Overall, I would say that they are probably my least favorite part of the Job. But, they don't have to be. Thanks to the great folks at [ZURB](http://zurb.com/) we can hit the ground running when developing HTML emails.
Normally when I need to add a drop shadow to an element I will use CSS box-shadow. There's another way that I can handle this though. I can use CSS filters. They allow me to do many different things like apply gray-scale, apply sepia, blur, adjust brightness, adjust contrast, adjust hue, invert colors, saturate colors, and alter opacity.
You may have noticed that your phone tends to scale up text automatically in an attempt to make things more readable on the smaller screen. The intentions are great but the effects may be undesired for the person in charge of the design. Well, you have the ability to prevent mobile device text inflation with the text-size-adjust property.
CSS Preprocessors like LESS, SASS, and Stylus are all the rage now-a-days and rightfully so. They all do some great stuff allowing us to write CSS in a more programmatic way where we repeat ourselves less and operate at a higher efficiency level. With all the good that they provide for us they do add a layer of complexity.
Some of my favorite parts of CSS3 are those concerning layout. So far I've explored Flexbox and Columns, but today I'm going to dig into CSS Regions.
If you would have asked me about the CSS Calc function six months or so ago I would have said "What's That?". But luckily for me I stumbled across some blog post highlighting the coolest new CSS stuff that's available for us to use and CSS Calc was one of them. It's really a pretty useful item to have at our disposal.
There are many pros and cons to using icon fonts and SVGs for icons in your designs. I had been under the impression that icon fonts were the more effective of the two but have had some reservations. For one, what happens if you need a multi-color icon? Remember, they are simply fonts so they have to be a solid color. The only way around that is to get all hacky and build the various components using other elements. The sizing of things is also a little odd since they are fonts they have to be sized with font-size and line-height which doesn't necessarily feel right. Using animations with them is also very limited when compared to SVG. And one last thing, they cant be set to scale at a percentage of their containing elements like SVGs can.
HTML5 is different than XHTML in many ways. One thing that XHTML never had was a way to make block-level elements clickable without using JavaScript. Well, in HTML5 it's now possible.
Layout has traditionally been a pretty difficult thing to get right when it comes to building web sites. With CSS3, however, it looks like things are getting a bit easier. I've written "Flexbox: Modern Web Layouts Simplified" which covered Flexbox layout techniques. That was cool, but there are other great layout features provided for us in CSS3, In this article I'm covering CSS3 Multiple Columns.
For those of you that have read my post "SVGs are Cool & You Should Start Using Them, If You’re Not Already" you know that I am a fan of SVGs. In fact, now that I know a little more about them I feel that they are very under used in modern web development. They are light weight, resolution independent, and they really open up the door to so many possibilities for enhancing user experiences.
If you want to be a good web designer you’ll need to continually learn, evolve, and update your skill set. This can be challenging, overwhelming, and exhausting or it can be fun. Over the years I’ve collected a list of some pretty handy resources that help make it more fun to keep yourself relevant so I thought I’d share some of my favorite web design & development resources.