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…)
Posts Tagged ‘CSS’
IE Corner Inserts via jQuery
Thursday, January 28th, 2010Image Buttons and Accessibility
Thursday, November 19th, 2009Image 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…)
A Simple jQuery Tabs Template
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009I 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…)
Reusable Transparent CSS Rounded Corners
Thursday, September 24th, 2009In 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…)
A Very Simple CSS Chat Bubble
Monday, September 14th, 2009Each 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…)
The Wisdom of Simplicity
Friday, July 24th, 2009Web 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…)
A Whole New Web?
Thursday, June 25th, 2009Should we abandon rounded corner techniques that require additional HTML markup in favor of emerging CSS techniques that are not yet supported on all browsers? Apparently, the answer is an overwhelming YES. (more…)
CSS Absolute Positioning
Monday, April 6th, 2009Absolute positioning is a very powerful CSS technique when used properly. Traditionally, when you use <div/> tags and the like, everything in your page design is generally stacked from top to bottom. Using absolute positioning gives you the freedom to place elements of your page just about anywhere you’d like. Here are some fundamentals of absolute positioning that can make your design appear more fluid, elegant, and easier to manage. (more…)
CSS in Print Media
Monday, February 23rd, 2009Most of the time, web designers will optimize a site to display on screen media (any type of screen, such as a computer monitor or a mobile device screen). If your site has a lot of information that could potentially be printed out by your visitors, you should consider adding print-specific CSS to your design in order to make your print media visitors happy. Depending on your design itself, the visitor’s printer, and the visitor’s web browser, you can get a number of different results when printing a given page from the internet. Here are a few quick and simple steps you can take to make your site display just as well on paper as it does on the screen. (more…)
Rounded Corners in Mozilla and Safari
Monday, January 26th, 2009The W3C’s CSS3 specification includes an oft-requested CSS attribute called border-radius. Using this attribute, you can create rounded-corner boxes that use no images, script, or other fancy DHTML tricks (pure CSS). This will make your site flexible, faster, and more accessible. It’s not yet supported in Internet Explorer 7/8, but other modern browsers have already introduced support for this fantastic CSS feature. (more…)