Subtlepatterns.com is a great free resource for high quality repeating backgrounds for use in your designs. It was created and is actively maintained by Atle Mo. With subtlepatterns.com you can simply browse all of the backgrounds and when you find one that you like you can download the image. He even provides a 2x version

I have been using CSS background properties for quite a few years and have only used what I have needed. There are some pretty cool things that can be done with backgrounds that I was not so familiar with. In this article I’ll highlight some of these not so common options. background-origin The background-origin property

Ever needed to quickly and precisely round corners on vector shapes and typography already added to your designs in illustrator? Well, it’s pretty easy to do nowadays. Here’s How it Works Select the objects you want to have rounded corners on and then go to “Effects” in the top tools bar, then “Effects” under “Illustrator

If you’ve ever created an SVG image in Adobe Illustrator you’ve seen some pretty crazy code. Just like all other code we write, it should be simple, clean, and lean. Also, like any other image type we want to make sure that it is optimized and has the highest quality with the smallest file size.

AngularJS is a newer JavaScript framework geared towards the creation and maintenance of single page web applications. It is considered to be a “toolset for building the framework most suited to your application development” meaning that, for the most part, you can choose the elements that you want to use and swap out those that

Often when creating a web design mock-up you’ll have the need to wrap text around objects. Illustrator makes this very quick and easy to do. Here’s How it Works Just add the object that you want to wrap the text around in front of the text Make Text Wrap Then select the object and the

Do you ever use browser developer tools just to figure out what fonts and font styles are being applied on your site and perhaps others? Well, there’s an easier way thanks to Chengyin Liu an engineer at Backplane. He has created the Whatfont Bookmarklet extension for Chrome. It’s pretty simple, just install the chrome extension,

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. PhotoShop became the industry standard as there weren’t a whole lot of other

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. Here’s How it Works Create a new swatch in the swatches pallet Save the Swatch as “Global” When the swatch options dialog opens up check the “Global” option and

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. jQuery Notebook jQuery Notebook is a small JavaScript plugin that mimics the editor functionality seen in other platforms like

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. The

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. Here’s How it Works

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

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

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. For Example… Google currently does this using an em tag: When it comes to semantics, the HTML5 mark tag is a better

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. The beauty of using a cubic-bezier() timing function is that it allows you to to create an acceleration curve so

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. For those of you that may not be clear on what kerning is, it deals with the spacing between certain pairs of letters letters such as W

Have you ever wanted to automatically place the cursor in a field when the page is rendered? I know I have. This sort of thing used to require more than just HTML to accomplish but with now HTML5 it’s a breeze. Here’s how you can autofocus fields with HTML5 form attributes. Yep, it’s that easy.

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 from Bells Design. He has captured and continues to capture amazing, high quality photos and he is providing them for us to use

Before I get started you should know that at the time of writing CSS Filter Effects are not supported in the latest versions of ie(11) and Firefox(27) so if you are using them you should try Chrome, Safari, or Opera instead. CSS filter effects are quickly becoming one of the hottest topics among web designers.

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

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. It is a very non-traditional user experience that takes the parallax scrolling

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

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. It’s really easy to add small caps using font-variant, here’s how: The CSS: The HTML: The Demo: See I’m Using Small Caps Browser Support: The