Beyond the Walls

We recently learned in class how to style links using pseudo-classes. But with great power comes great responsibility. This short article explains why your shouldn’t get carried away changing your links default states.

http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200904/let_your_links_look_like_links/

I find myself doing a lot of unnecessary scrubbing and hunting for links on many sites. It makes me wonder why some sites even have links if they’re so afraid that their users might discover them.

Vertically aligning items is a tricky thing to do in CSS. While it should be as simple as setting vertical-align: middle;, that method doesn’t work for block level elements (read: paragraphs). While there are techniques to get that to work, this article is a good introduction to what you CAN do with the vertical align property.

http://css-tricks.com/what-is-vertical-align/

CSS has a property called vertical align. It can be a bit confusing when you first learn about it, so I thought we could go through it’s use a little bit.

For those of you interested in creating backgrounds that are more than just a simple color or gradient, this post by Smashing Magazine offers several examples for inspiration. In my previous post about design galleries, I explained why it’s helpful to look at other’s work for inspiration. Building upon that theme, take a look at how other web designers used different background styles for their site.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/31/backgrounds-in-web-design-examples-and-best-practices-2/

The background holds the theme of the website, and there are a vast amount of possibilities when designing a website background. This article goes over the best practices and popular trends of backgrounds in the current stage of innovative Web design.

When you’re designing a website, it helps to have some inspiration for ideas. One of the best ways to create a new look is to take an old look and remodel it. Other times only a kick-start is needed to get your creative juices flowing. With that in mind, here are a few design galleries I like to use for when I need some inspiration.

• Design Meltdown
• Open Source Web Design
• CSS Beauty
• Minimal Sites

For my second post, I continue on with the design theme. This time from the blog of the “Just Creative Design” agency.

The article briefly covers each topic with links to delve in deeped. We’ve learned about color (or colour, as they call it) and how it affects design, so it’s nice they start with something familiar. Take a look and see how you can improve your own design.

http://justcreativedesign.com/2008/06/13/how-to-design-learn-the-basics/

Want to know how to design? Then you should learn the basics of design. The basic elements of design include colour, line, shape, scale, space, texture and value and these are the fundamental pieces that make up any piece of work.

For the first post on “Beyond the Walls” I bring you one of my favorite Web resources, SmashingMagazine. They’re really great with their posts in that you can easily skim the article, but you’re still able to get in depth information when you really care about it.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/02/10-impressive-simple-design-techniques

“Simple effects and techniques are the building blocks of today’s designs… With a ‘less is more’ mentality, we’ve selected 10 very simple and impressive design techniques that can drastically improve the performance and appearance of your designs.”