The Earth-Toned Pill

Link: http://csshowto.com/layout/psd-to-csshtml-in-easy-steps-part-1/

If you're a website front-end designer who is unfortunate enough to depend on others for the actual coding piece of the site development puzzle, then this tutorial is for you!

The folks at CSS How To.com have a massively-extensive 4 part series dedicated to the task that will help get your skills up to par.

Check it out by clicking on the link above!

Link: http://www.helpthehoneybees.com/

A friend sent me the link to this Flash site today, and I was really impressed with the complexity and simplicity of the site Häagen-Dazs® put together for their save the honey bees initiative.

The colors are soft and natural, very balanced and in tune with the subject matter. And while it has a good degree of interactivity, it doesn't overdo it on the visuals at all.

Check this great site out when you get a chance!

I'm a gigantic tutorial whore when it comes to any of the Adobe apps... It can be the simplest thing, or the most complex task, but I love reading them and trying out new techniques all the same.

I can across this excellent tutorial today that discusses how to create the glossy navigation look for your site in photoshop.

Its short and sweet, and if you've never used these techniques before, quite cool...

I'm going to try and register for at least one day of this conference, which should be well worth the money spent to register for it.

If you're a web designer and live in (or can make it to) Orlando between October 13th and 16th, you should check it out if you can.

View the schedule of events here.

One of my favorites, the Flash Blog, posted a link a few days ago to this great tutorial on creating a very simple Actionscript 3 based Flash preloader that I think you'll find useful.

The tutorial is clear and concise, and as an added bonus its a video...

Check it out!

One of my favorite web design sites, Web Designer Wall, has a great post you'll want to check out that lists 47 great Javascript plugins you can integrate into your web designs that you can use to enhance the user experience and functionality of your sites. As a bonus, they even include samples of the plugins in action!

Some of them, such as Lightbox and jCarousel I've used before. But the list includes many more that you'll find highly useful!

Check the list out here.

In doing my latest project for IvoryJones.net, I found that the standard CSS text-formatted list navigation just didn't quite fit right, but I was loathe to resort to using pure images as an alternative.

After searching around the web a bit I found a great CSS solution to my problem that turned out to be an wesome compromise: Matt Varone's text-based image navigation.

This solution is great because it allows you to use the power and flexibility of CSS in order to integrate images into your standard list-style nav bar. Another reason I love it is because it uses only a single image that contains all the different navigation items and states, which makes load times fast and keeps the overall file size small.

To see my slightly-modified version of his method in action, check out this.

I've been doing a metric ton of web design lately, and I am quickly approaching a point where I am officially a seasoned XHTML/CSS designer. The only monkey wrench I find in my quest for web design perfection is the pain-in-the-ass issue of cross browser support for CSS standards.

For those not familliar with what this means, when I design a website, I use cascading style sheets to do nearly all of my webpage layout, formatting and styling work behind the scenes. This allows me to use one or several style sheets that instruct the browser on how to render page elements while the actual HTML code on the page itself remains light and easy to read and/or modify.

But the problem is that not all web browsers implement CSS fully or in a standardized way. Simply put, all browsers display web pages differently where CSS is involved. Although browser engines largely fall into either the IE or Firefox camp (in terms of page rendering), I find myself writing validated CSS and XHTML code that works fine in IE6 or 7, but displays totally broken in Firefox, Opera, etc. Part of the problem for me up to now has been the necessity of having 4+ browsers installed just to do testing on a site. Today though I found browsershots.org, where you can get screenshots of how your page displays in 30+ different browsers!

But while this is a great tool for 'troubleshooting', I'm still struggling with how to actually work with or around the issue. Do you design for IE and say 'oh well' to other browser users? Not likely, but you can't exactly do the reverse either. I guess for me its going to mean more research and carpal tunnel syndrome before I make any real progress...

Anyone out there have some advice?