Today we are glad to release two useful cheat sheets that will help you quickly look up the right CSS 2.1-property or an obscure CSS 3 property. The style sheets contain most important properties, explanations and keywords for each property. The CSS 2.1 Help Sheet covers Syntax, Font, Text, Margins, Padding, Border, Position, Background, List, Media Types and Keywords.
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In this article, Cameron Chapman presents a number of principles of minimalist design, as well as an exploration of current trends and additional examples.
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In our past articles, we’ve experimented with better ways to engage users on web pages with CSS3. We love getting into the nuts and bolts of web design by showing off some nifty coding tricks. In this article we’ll take a step back to provide some reasoning for designers to embark on that next redesign.
Great web design happens with sound user needs, solid business goals and focused metrics. Learning how to deconstruct a website is an important step in building a plan that aligns the company vision with the needs of users. A good review will put the focus on the profitability of the business.
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A couple of weeks ago we published the article Expert Advice for Students and Young Web Designers, in which we presented a group interview with professional designers and developers. We tried to find answers to questions that are particularly useful and interesting for those just starting to design websites for a living or considering diving into the Web design industry.
In the comments to that article, many readers wished we’d invited more female designers on the panel — in particular because, “There is no way of discerning how the experience of a female designer might differ, simply because there is a complete lack of representation.” So, we decided to prepare an article featuring specifically professional women designers giving their expert advice for young Web designers.
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A certain category of design gaffes can be boiled down to violations of audience expectations. Websites that don’t work in Internet Explorer are a heck of a nasty surprise for users who, bless their souls, want the same Internet experience as everyone else. Websites that prevent copying, whether through careless text-as-image conversions or those wretched copyright pop-ups from the turn of the century, cripple a feature that works nearly everywhere else on the Internet. Avoiding this category of blunders is crucial to good design, which is why I am upset that one particular pitfall has been overlooked with extreme frequency.
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It’s been a while since I’ve posted an inspiration post and I thought I would do one today. Well, I have something special for this post. As we all know, today is Mother’s Day (in the US, not sure about other countries). Mother’s Day happens once a year and it’s a day when we celebrate and recognize mothers and motherhood in general. In this post, I’ve gathered up some awesome Mother’s Day designs for your viewing pleasure.
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I’ve always stressed the importance of practice and experimentation. If you want to get better at something or if you want to learn something, you have to keep on doing it over and over again. This is very true with web design as well. We’ve even published an article here on Design Informer about the benefits of experimentation.
I’m very busy as I work a full-time 9-6 job as a web designer, then I go home and work on Design Informer, soon to be Coding Informer, and I also do a variety of freelance work. With all these on my plate, it’s very hard to find time to relax, open up Photoshop and design, or open up Dreamweaver (code view of course) and just mess around with some code.
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We love beautiful typography, and we appreciate the efforts of designers who come up with great typographic techniques and tools or who just share their knowledge with fellow designers. We are always looking for such resources. We compile them, carefully select the best ones and then prepare them for our round-ups. And now it’s time to present a beautiful fresh dose of typography-related resources.
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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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There is little doubt that WordPress is one of the most popular blogging and content management platforms out there today. This is not an article about WordPress, though, but rather a more general musing on one of its thought-provoking taglines: “Code Is Poetry.”
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