Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category
I’m a huge, huge fan of the latest Firefox release. But I was really, really disapointed that a LOT of my very favorite (and most used!) plugins were incompatible. The plugin I felt most lost without was Aardvark, which I use every single day, practically all day long to aid me in development, editing and design.
Aardvark is a simple little Firefox plugin that when activated (right click and choose “Start Aardvark”) lets you highlight each elements on the page with a red border - not only that, a tab appears on the border with the element and id/class that is associated with it.
This plugin is critical for me (along with Firebug) when diagnosing layout problems.
Every once in a while we have to take our site down for upgrades, or god forbid something breaks and we have to fix it and we don’t want to leave the broken version for our users to see.
I was inspired to write this after seeing the funny Technorati maintenance page this morning:
Maintenance pages are important for many reasons, but one of the most important reasons is to make people remember to come back. If someone is visiting your site for the first time and you are currently working on your site and have placed it in maintenance mode typically you will replace your index with a page explaining the downtime and encouraging users to check back later (giving a specific time frame is good practice).
Rounded corners are a great design element to escape from the blocky/boxiness a lot of web designers fall victim to. I remember the first time I created my own rounded corner box using Photoshop and HTML/CSS. What a thrill :) A lot of people shy away from it because it SEEMS a lot more difficult than it really is.
I’m going to show two ways to create this effect using Photoshop (or the graphic editor of your choice) and HTML/CSS. There are other ways to create this effect using just CSS - but I really am not a big fan of it because it creates a lot more empty divs than this method. Yes if images are off you will lose this effect - but I’m willing to sacrifice that.
Like I said I’m going to demonstrate two ways to accomplish this. The first is using just a flat rounded corner image with no other effects. The second will have a box with a drop shadow, border and gradient. :) So let’s start easy!
There are probably a million different ways to do this, but I’m going to show the way that I have preferred to do it, combined with my favorite centering position method.
So the simple way to do this is as follows:
Photoshop is an amazingly powerful tool. It alone can allow you to create fantastic designs and photo manipulations. But, there are many, many other resources available to designers to enhance Photoshop and increase your productivity.
I’m talking about free gradients, patterns, brushes, layer styles and more that you can download and add on to Photoshop.
