As web designers, we always have something new to learn. Over the last decade our workflow has changed dramatically — it’s become more sophisticated and highly diversified. Not only do we have a much larger variety of improved tools to use; there’s also an endless stream of new techniques emerging and spreading within the web design community via social networks. [Updated June/14/2017]
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Interactivity can transform a dull static website into a dynamic tool that not only delights users but conveys information more effectively. In this post, we’ll walk through five different coding techniques that can be easily implemented on any website to provide a richer user experience. These techniques will allow you to better display difficult content, help users find information more effectively and provide meaningful UI cues without overwhelming the user: on-page text search, drag controls for oversized content, subtle hover effects, comment count bars and a full-page slider.
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Our recent article covering the new features of Adobe Fireworks CS5 provoked a very interesting and intense debate. But because comments ranged from “Fireworks is the best tool for screen design!” to “What exactly is Fireworks?”, we thought that another article on this topic might be very useful to Smashing Magazine readers.
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We have been publishing articles about CSS3 for a while now, and we keep receiving angry e-mails from some developers who complain that it doesn’t make sense to use CSS3 today. Yes, Internet Explorer doesn’t support most CSS3 properties. And yes, CSS3 vendor prefixes are bad for maintainability (and this is why we recommend extracting vendor prefixes in a separate CSS3 file).
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Over the last years we’ve got a pretty good understanding of what CSS does, how it works and how we can use it for our layouts, typography and visual presentation of the content. However, there are still some attributes that are not so well-known; also, CSS3 offers us new possibilities and tools that need to be understood, learned and then applied in the right context to the right effect.
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As a web community, we’ve made a lot of exciting progress in regards to CSS3. We’ve put properties like text-shadow & border-radius to good use while stepping into background-clip and visual effects like transitions and animations. We’ve also spent a great deal of time debating how and when to implement these properties. Just because a property isn’t widely supported by browsers or fully documented at the moment, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be working with it.
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Adobe Fireworks is the Swiss Army knife for many developers and Web, UX, UI and graphic designers. The application is known for its versatility, excellent blend of vector and bitmap tools and powerful built-in wireframing and prototyping options. Also, according to the SoDA 2010 Digital Marketing Outlook survey, Fireworks has become an important tool for many digital agencies.
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In Modern CSS Layouts, Part 1: The Essential Characteristics, you learned that modern, CSS-based web sites should be progressively enhanced, adaptive to diverse users, modular, efficient and typographically rich. Now that you know what characterizes a modern CSS web site, how do you build one? Here are dozens of essential techniques and tools to learn and use to achieve the characteristics of today’s most successful CSS-based web pages.
Just as in the previous article, we’re not going to be talking about design trends and styles; these styles are always changing. Instead, we’re focusing on the specific techniques that you need to know to create modern CSS-based web pages of any style. For each technique or tool, we’ll indicate which of the five characteristics it helps meet. To keep this shorter than an encyclopedia, we’ll also just cover the basics of each technique, then point you to some useful, hand-picked resources to learn the full details.
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Although CSS is generally considered a simple and straightforward language, sometimes it requires creativity, skill and a bit of experimentation. The good news is that designers and developers worldwide often face similar problems and choose to share their insights and workarounds with the wider community.
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Almost every movie has a scene in which a character pull the protagonist aside and says, “There’s something you should know about [insert another character’s name here].” Most of the time, we find out some dark secret about a supposed friend of the protagonist or that the main ally is actually an evil overlord.
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