I don’t know what it is, but I have this real uncertainty about using too many images on an interface - like where you would have to use four Gifs to make a box look like it had rounded corners. I think it comes from a time when we had spacer Gifs and tables, and there was a load of stuff going on in the code just to make something look a certain way.
And besides, I’m rubbish at image slicing and positioning.
Thankfully I have found a nice script. “Curvy Corners” is a 23kb JavaScript file that can be bound to any DIV element and generate really neat anti-aliased corners, whilst the colours and borders remain the DIV’s own CSS properties.
Okay. I can understand the implications of using JavaScript, and the 23kb file - but most people have JavaScript turned on, and how big are a set of Gifs? The real advantage of this is that when you are developing you can quickly and easily change the colour, borders and curvature of the box without having to open Photoshop.
It even works in I.E 6 & 7 beta!
Demo 1 - Red box with 3px white border, 20px radius. Demo 2 - Photograph with 20px radius.
Thoughts?
My reason for lack of updates is because I have been working on a few designs over the last couple of weeks in some attempt to restart my creative drive. My interest in web design stems from a love of graphic design, but when you do a BSc in Web System Development your time tends to be taken up doing less creative stuff, like usability studies and waiting for everyone else to learn HTML.
designmeltdown.com is a great resource for aspiring web designers that covers the current trends and explains why and where they should be used.
Whilst there are a lot of tutorial sites around that cover colour theory, Photoshop techniques and layout, I have never come across anything quite as complete and well backed up with real world examples.
I urge you all to take a look.
The people at 456 Berea Street dot com have written a scale of HTML knowledge, ranging from Level 0 (your grandmother…) to Level 6 (Dan Cederholm).
I was quite pleased that I fell easily into Level 5 (“These people tend to think about structure and semantics first and presentation later. Strict doctypes are generally used at this level to encourage the separation of semantic and presentational markup.”) even though I still argue that there are some cases where tables are suited to layout.
Where do you rank?
