Article Archives

I used to work in Pre-Press for a long time. Longer even now than I’ve been working on the web. I was in and out of InDesign documents all day every day. I’m not an uber-pro, but I know my …

Learn More / Buy Now

It’s ready! Jeff Starr and I started the journey of writing Digging Into WordPress in December ’08 and it’s finally for sale. It’s 400 pages packed full of WordPress learning. We go from setting things …

I originally wrote this over two years ago. It was getting a little long in the tooth, especially now that HTML5 has come along and made HTML far more beautiful than even XHTML 1.1 was. So I updated it!

I …

CSS3 can do some seriously neat stuff. Just check out some of the crazy 3D stuff you can do in WebKit. But as we all know, we need to be careful with what we choose to do with it. The …

The poll is in the sidebar, so jump down there to vote. You can see examples of the different ways to format CSS here. I think that covers most of the popular ways to format CSS, but if you …

When this poll first kicked off, the “late” options were way ahead. Over time, things have evened off a bit, and the results are closer than I thought they might be.

If you are in the on time or early …

Lots of folks joined in on the fun with the Show Off Your Sprites! contest. I used the ol’ random number generator and came up with Lee Kowalkowski as the big winner, congrats Lee! Now let’s take a look at …

As I do from time to time, I redesigned my personal site (redesign notes). I wanted to make the site a better vessel for writing, so the shell of the site has a much nicer structure for doing that. …

I can’t remember where, but a while ago I read something about using subdomains to serve up a sites resources as a way to potentially speed up loading. The theory was that the protocol that browsers use to communicate with …

I just updated my old CSS Sprites article yesterday, and I thought it would be kind of fun to ask everyone to share sprites that they have created themselves. Let’s make a quick giveaway out of it too!

I’ve finished …

This post was originally co-authored in late 2007 by me and Volkan Görgülü, I’m updating it now to improve it a bit and make it more current.
You’ve heard of them, but…

Do you really understand them? The name might …

I am really liking the new snippets area we have going here. I find myself using it all the time, which is exactly why I thought it was worth building. Remember there is an RSS feed just for snippets, which …

I like to be confident with post titles, but the reality in this case is a *possible* solution for very long dropdowns. The problem with long dropdowns is that the dropdown itself can go below the “fold” of the website. …

Hey folks, don’t salt your scotch with tears on my account, but I’m posting to tell you all I just suffered a complete data loss on my computer. I figured I’d go through how it happened.

I woke up on …

If you’ve been using The Printliminator, you may have noticed some updates to it. That’s the cool part about a bookmarklet that references external code, updates and new features can be pushed out without having to have everyone ditch …

There is an updated version of this!

The Plan

In this tutorial we are going to build a little chat program that is really easy to get up and running on any server running PHP. No database is required – …

Introducing The Printliminator!

I had this idea when I was at a lyrics site trying to print out some lyrics. The page didn’t have a good print stylesheet and was full of all kinds of crap. I copied the …

Twitter. They talk about it on the local news, they talk about it on ESPN… it’s mainstream. It’s almost a household name like YouTube, Facebook, or Johnson and Johnson. Businesses know that other businesses are using it, and they feel …

There is a new poll up in the sidebar. This time regarding when jobs that include completion dates actually get done.

There are reasons on both sides of the client/designer relationship that affect when jobs actually get done. How quick …

function drawShape(){
var canvas = document.getElementById(‘results-canvas’);
if (canvas.getContext){
var ctx = canvas.getContext(’2d’);
ctx.fillStyle = “rgba(0,150,197,0.8)”;
ctx.fillRect(0,0,302,50);
ctx.fillStyle = “rgba(81,203,84,0.8)”;
ctx.fillRect(0,50,120,50);
ctx.fillStyle = “rgba(203,184,81,0.8)”;
ctx.fillRect(0,100,103,50);
ctx.fillStyle = “rgba(203,87,81,0.8)”;
ctx.fillRect(0,150,46,50);
}
};
drawShape();

I drew the chart above with the <canvas> element. …

As I’m posting this, the marketplace websites that Envato runs (ThemeForest, GraphicRiver, etc) have been redesigned. It’s a pretty big overhaul… new logos, loads of new features for both buyers and sellers, the iconic “switcher” to change …

I think this is the coolest thing since Kayne carved cult symbols onto his head: each snippet in the Snippets area now has little links when you roll over them for adding the snippet to Coda or TextMate. I realize …

You know you should use JavaScript when the task cannot be accomplished with any other technology.

That’s what Doug suggested when I asked him for a nicer spin on a something that was going through my head:

JavaScript: If it …

There is a new snippets-only feed! This will always remain it’s own separate feed I think, and not be a part of the main feed. Mostly because I hope that the snippets will grow and grow and there will hopefully …

Using a <select> dropdown menu to create navigation isn’t as common as it once was, but it’s still around. It got ripped on pretty good for being an inaccessible / obtrusive. Indeed a lot of the scripts you’ll find out …

Text inputs on forms can be used to submit numbers. A common use would be a “quantity” input on an eCommerce site. Changing the quantity value, from the user’s perspective entails tabbing or clicking to the input, deleting it’s current …

The new design has been rolled out. Nothing to shockingly different I hope, just a refresher. It’s kind of hard to say, but I think this is the 5th significant iteration of the design at this point. The lines are …

A one-pixel background image can be a pretty versatile thing. With repeat-x it can be a horizontal line, repeat-y makes a vertical line, and repeat makes it a fill color. Just as a little fun proof of concept, we can …

When printing a web page with <select> elements on it, the select dropdown prints just like it looks.

This is of course borderline useless on a printed page. It may even be hiding important details vital to understanding what the …

Hey ya’ll – I’ll let you in on a little secret here, there is a design update coming out soon here on CSS-Tricks. As usual, just a little realign / refresh / spit shine kinda thing. There are several reasons …

I just tossed out a new poll. I’ve been wanting to do this one for a while, and the short-but-global GMail outage yesterday confirmed now is a good time. The question is:

How Do You Email?

There are people that …

You probably recognize his name, but if you don’t, you certainly recognize his work. Smashing Magazine is a juggernaut in the design and development web publishing world, and soon to cross over into traditional publishing as well. Vitaly is the …

• Yes, I’d take it. – 68%  
• No, I’d turn it down. – 32%  

The people who say they would take the job outnumber the people who would not by two to one.

There was a large and interesting …

Widows, typographically speaking, are single words that awkwardly break down onto their own line. It looks uncomfortable, and it reads uncomfortable. Article titles are especially prone to this because of the large type / short line length, and look exceptionally …

Database
is forcontent

HTML
is fordescribing and displaying content

CSS
is fordesign

JavaScript
is forfunctionality

Those are the appropriate uses for these technologies. Inappropriate use is when you cross those lines and create a mismatch.…

CSS Sprites is a technique where you use a background-image, a set width and height, and adjust the background-position to display only the portion you need to show. This way you can use a single image and display lots of …

Just what the world needs, another jQuery slider. YAWN. I know, check this one out though, it’s got lots of cool features.

Here on CSS-Tricks, I’ve created a number of different sliders. Three, in fact. A “featured content” …

The voting is now open for the 2009 .net Magazine Awards. I’m stoked this year to be nominated in both the Best Blog category and Best Vodcast category.

Voting is quick and easy and if you feel so inclined, go …

I collected a bunch of data from you guys when you filled out that form to enter the 2-Year Anniversary Giveaway. I figured I’d aggregate it into some graphs, courtesy of Wufoo.

…

How much do you care that the

What helps a design business stay healthy and successful over time is having regular clients with regular monthly billable work. The one-off jobs might be more glamorous and more fun, but in the long run it’s probably your regulars that …

The Front-End Design Conference was made from a lot of “firsts”. Many of us speakers were speaking in front of an audience of peers for the first time since college Speech. For Dan Denney, it was his first time …

It’s funny how fast people can decide on things. People can see a website redesign and love it or hate it right away. It might take someone 15 seconds of seeing it before they are furiously writing up a comment …

Authentic Jobs is a long-running, respected, and successful web design/development job board. I’m sure a lot of that success is due to the beautiful, minimal, and thoughtful design by owner and proprietor Cameron Moll. There is also a generous …

LearningjQuery.com has a pretty cool presentation of the dates of their blog posts. Check it:

The typeface and the year being vertical should tip you off right away that images are being used to accomplish this. But also note that …

Someone recently asked me about this technique and my first reaction was that it was probably a little too mundane to cover as a tutorial. But then I got to thinking that there is actually a few interesting things happening …

Building an eCommerce site? There are a zillion options. In a recent group interview about eCommerce, I talked a bit how I think it’s weird that all these eCommerce software solutions are also CMSs. At the root of things what …

The following is a guest post by the first-rate illustrator Joe Lifrieri. Joe walks through his own process showing us not only how he does things but why. You can see Joe’s portfolio and blog at Hugs for Monsters…

You have a small area. You mouse over it. An area pops up giving you a zoomed in closer look. This is a jQuery plugin that does it. I’m not going to tell you what you should use it for …

Congratulations to all the winners of the two-year anniversary giveaway! They were chosen completely at random from my cheezy random number generator I made for the last contest. Extra special thanks to all the sponsors who donated the gifts. …

This post will focus on the different ways to format CSS, which differs from the different ways to organize CSS. Definitely related concepts, but I think organization has more to do with how things are grouped and ordered while …