In this article, the focus is on what’s coming: styling techniques you’ll use in the immediate and near-term future. From styling HTML 5 elements to rearranging layout based on display parameters to crazy selection patterns to transforming element layout, these are all techniques that you may use tomorrow, next month, or next year. With partial browser support, they’re all on the cutting edge of Web design.
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Often, it’s the little details that turn a good layout into a great design; details such as subtle textures, shading and smooth shapes. Photoshop contains a vast array of tools for embellishing a design, but choosing the right one isn’t always easy.
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Adding interactivity and animations to a design doesn’t have to be complicated or make the website inaccessible when you use modern Web standards. In this article, we’ll explore several examples and theories that employ CSS, HTML, SVG, the canvas element and JavaScript. Some of these techniques you’ll know, others you may not have considered. Let’s start with the basics. “Bringing Interactivity To Your Website With Web Standards”)](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/?p=85432)
Manipulating HTML with JavaScript is the most common method of adding interactivity to a website. But before you start using JavaScript, having a strong understanding of the CSS visual formatting model and box model is important. They are vital to making sense of how HTML elements can be manipulated visually. When you dynamically change the style of an HTML element, it will flow with and react to the rest of the document. Learning to anticipate and control what is affected can be difficult.
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Delivering great presentations is an art, and preparing the slides for them very much so, too. But we’re not going to talk about that. We’re also not going to get into the debate about whether to use open or closed technologies to create slide decks — this is something you need to hash out yourself, and there are some interesting discussions going on.
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The iPhone 4 features a vastly superior display resolution (614400 pixels) over previous iPhone models, containing quadruple the 153600-pixel display of the iPhone 3GS. The screen is the same physical size, so those extra dots are used for additional detail — twice the detail horizontally, and twice vertically. For developers only using Apple’s user interface elements, most of the work is already done for you.
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Web typography has evolved a lot over the last years. Today we see rich, accessible typography, a plethora of type design choices for the web and a number of remarkable, type-based web designs. It’s a great time for web design, and it’s a great time for web typography. Still, being as excited as we are, we should not forget about the foundational principles of good type design on the web and use them properly within our projects. Great choice is good, but, most importantly, we should be making meaningful typographic choices in our designs.
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CSS Sprites are a relatively simple technique once you understand the fundamentals and it can be applied in all manner of ways. A common use is for a graphic intensive navigation, but it can also be useful for buttons or even styling headings with the corporate font.
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These are great times for front-end developers. After months of exaggerated excitement about HTML5 and CSS3, the web design community now starts coming up with CSS techniques that actually put newly available technologies to practical use instead of abusing them for pure aesthetic purposes. We see fewer “pure CSS images” and more advanced, clever CSS techniques that can actually improve the Web browsing experience of users. And that’s a good thing!
In this post we present recently released CSS techniques, tutorials and tools for you to use and enhance your workflow, thus improving your skills. Please don’t hesitate to comment on this post and let us know how exactly you are using them in your workflow. However, please avoid link dropping, but share your insights and your experience instead. Also, notice that some techniques are not only CSS-based, but use JavaScript, or JavaScript-libraries as well.
Our job is to promote good, high-quality content and resources. If you wrote or developed something useful, contact us — we will do our best to spread the word and help you out.
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As designers, we have to create an intuitive user experience, solve design problems and provide a beautiful and functional user interfaces. Unlike print design, we don’t have the luxury of designing in a static area; rather, our canvas is ever-changing in its content, browser width, page length and more. We do need to be able to code to some extent and be able to build a design around a structure of code. Yet, with these complications comes an opportunity for unique functionality, interactive effects and better user experience.
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