I am pleased to announce the launch of my latest project, ThePeev.com. The Peev is a quick and dirty WordPress site designed for the sole purpose of serving as my personal artistic outlet. I’m posting doodles and sketches regarding all the things in life that may or may not bother you. I had a lot of fun creating the site, which came together nicely from concept to complete in less than eight hours of work. What’s your pet peeve? Visit ThePeev.com and let me know.
28Jan '10
IE Corner Inserts via jQuery
I recently had a client whose design demanded rounded corners in a lot of different areas of their site. As I looked through the design documentation, the variety and color of these rounded widgets really started to add up. I quickly decided that pure CSS corners were the best choice for their design. Most users can utilize border-radius to apply the rounded effect without any overhead (the browser does the work), and the remaining users can be handled by a quick and easy bit of jQuery. // more
12Jan '10
Did You Notice?
I updated the site’s theme a bit to add some “fresh.” Please give me a bit of time to go through some of my older posts and clean them up for a better display. I’m trying to be very good and do things like add <acronym/> tags and <code/> tags to my posts. Ooh, how very accessible of me. My SEO senses are tingling. More tutorials and other goodies coming very soon.
19Nov '09
Image Buttons and Accessibility
Image buttons are a fairly common occurrence in web media. As with everything else in web design, you have a dizzying arsenal of methods from which you can choose to create this type of design element, and choosing the right method can greatly aid in your design’s accessibility, performance, and SEO-friendliness. // more
22Oct '09
A Simple jQuery Tabs Template
I love jQuery; I use it all the time. I also love the great UI controls that come with the jQuery UI library. Unfortunately, I’ve found that a lot of these controls can be a little heavy in terms of required JS/CSS files that your clients will have to download in order to use these controls. Being the minimalist that I am, I really want to drop a small amount of CSS and HTML into my site and quickly get myself up and running with a tab structure that’s both flexible and accessible. // more
13Oct '09
Five Web Design Tools You Shouldn’t Be Without
Just about every web designer uses applications like Dreamweaver, Coda, Photoshop, and the like for their work each and every day. These tools really lay a foundation for web design work, but there are a number of other applications and plug-ins out there that you may not be aware of. These tools can increase your productivity and make your job easier to boot. In an effort to alleviate your designer woes, I have come up with a list of the five most valuable (and FREE) tools that I’ve found. Your comments and supplemental suggestions are most welcome! // more
24Sep '09
Reusable Transparent CSS Rounded Corners
In retrospective, there are definitely some areas where I could have improved on my Karate Corners design. I decided to take a second look and write a quick post that details how I create corners today, after almost a year of evolution in the ever-changing world of web design. This is absolutely the most simple and efficient way to create rounded corners using strictly CSS and HTML. // more
14Sep '09
A Very Simple CSS Chat Bubble
Each time you implement a new design element into your site, there are a vast array of approaches you can take to achieve the same outcome. Often times, I feel that the most simple of solutions is the best one. When implementing the “user comments” feature into ThumbSticks.com, I decided to wrap each user comment in a sort of “chat bubble box,” much like you would see in a comic book story. I experimented with various solutions that gave me different amounts of flexibility and performance, but I eventually settled on a very simple solution that resulted in what I think is an elegant CSS chat bubble. // more
11Sep '09
Portfolio Additions
I’m constantly creating new designs, either for work or for fun, so periodically I try to update my portfolio to include the latest and greatest. Check out the newest additions and please let me know what you think!
24Jul '09
The Wisdom of Simplicity
Web designers would be wise to approach every situation with one thing in mind: simplicity. Simplicity is the cornerstone of designing a well-structured and highly flexible HTML/CSS design. I’ve found that all too often, many designers approach a website with one thing in mind: the “look” of the fully rendered site. They approach each page or screen with a definitive pixel-perfect image in their heads, and they execute the design process to produce each pixel as it was originally intended. // more