Each one of these textures was made by combining 6-10 textures in different layers in Photoshop, along with some color overlays. I consider them to be some of the best examples of grunge textures that I’ve ever made, I hope you think the same! In the next few weeks I’m going to try and return to my roots and start shooting more photographic textures, so keep your eyes peeled for those. Enjoy!

Preview

a

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I am a huge fan of the updated Appearance panel in the Illustrator CS4. I have really found the Appearance panel to be useful when creating type treatments that I constantly need to repeat.  One of these styles is a metal type treatment. This tutorial is pretty similar to the Letterpress Font and Sketchy Font tutorials in that it uses the Appearance panel to create a type treatment that is fully editable when it is done.

Final Image

Below is the final type treatment we will be working towards. You probably have seen many other metal type tutorials, but in this one you will be able to edit the text after the effect is created!

Tutorial Detail

• Program: Adobe Illustrator CS4
• Difficulty: Beginner
• Estimated Completion Time: 15-20 minutes

Step 1

Choose a font (I am using Museo Slab 700) and type out some text with the Type tool (T). I like to start with a clean slate in the Appearance panel, so take of any fill or stroke on the type.

Step 2

From the pop-up menu of the Appearance panel, choose New Fill. Next, click the swatch thumbnail in the Appearance panel of the new fill and change the swatch to a linear gradient.

Step 3

For this step we are going to add two Color Stops to the gradient to give us the metal effect. First click on the Gradient Slider in the Gradient panel around in the middle of the other two Color Stops. Next, add another Color Stop to the Gradient Slider so you have a total of four. Change the first Color Stop to a 70% black, the second to white, the third to 100% black and the last to a 30% black.

Step 4

Now that we have the correct Color Stops, we need to adjust the gradient. Within the Gradient panel change the Angle to -90. Next, select the white Color Stop and change the Position to 45%, then select the black Color Stop and change the Position to 50%. Finally, select the Midpoint in-between the black and 30% Colors Stops and change the Location to 35%.

Step 5

From the pop-up menu of the Appearance panel, choose New Fill. Select the second fill in the Appearance panel and change the linear gradient to a two Color Stop linear gradient. Change the first Color Stop to a 32% black and the second to 100% black. Make sure the gradient Angle is set to -90%.

Step 6

With the new fill still selected in the Appearance panel, go Effect > Path > Offset Path. When the Offset path dialog opens, change the Offset to 1 px. This might be different depending upon the dimensions of your text. If you click the arrow for the latest fill in the Appearance panel you should see the Offset effect under it.

Step 7

Make sure the two Color Stop fill is selected in the Appearance panel and press the Duplicate Selected Item button from the bottom of the Appearance panel. Select the new copy below the first and click the Offset Path item. When the dialog opens, change the Offset to 2 px. Next Change the first Color Stop in the new fill selection to 10% and the second Color Stop to a 60% black.

Step 8

For the next couple of steps it is good idea to have the treatment on a dark background so you can see the effects. Create a rectangle with the Rectangle tool (M) and place it behind the other artwork.

Step 9

You can stop here if you would like but you can really jazz up the treatment by adding some sprites. The cool thing is you can add these in the Appearance panel as well as the other effects! Start by creating a new fill it the Appearance panel and making sure you select the top most item. Go Effect > Convert to Shape > Ellipse. In the Shape Options dialog, check the Absolute radial button and change the Width and Height to 50px.

Step 10

With the new fill still selected, change it to a radial gradient. You only need two Colors Stops for this effect, so delete any other Color Stops in the gradient. Next, change the first Color Stop to white with a 80% Opacity and change the last Color Stop to white with 0% Opacity.

Step 11

We can position the burst wherever we like. To do this, make sure the same item is selected in the Appearance panel as the previous step and go Effect > Distort & Transform > Transform. In the Transform Effect dialog, change the Move Horizontal and Vertical positions to the desired amount.

Step 12

With the latest item select, press the Duplicate Selected Item button in the Appearance panel. Select the new duplicated item and press the arrow to the left of it in the Appearance panel, showing all the effects in the item. Click on Ellipse to bring up the Shape options and change the Absolute Width and Height to 25px.

Step 13

With the adjusted ellipse still selected in the Appearance panel, go Effect > Distort & Transform > Zig Zag. In the Zig Zag dialog, change the Size to 10 px and the Ridges to 2 (you might have to change the Size to more or less depending on the original size of your text).

Step 14

We are done! That was pretty easy. You can easily create this effect without the Appearance panel, but creating this effect like in this tutorial you can easily adjust anything with the text without changing the effect. It is also a good idea to create a Graphic Style for easy implementation to other text and objects within Illustrator. Simply select the text with the metal treatment and press the New Graphic Styles button in the Graphic Styles panel. Now just select some text or other object and select your new Graphic Style!

Final Image

Below is the final image with a couple of other fonts and object with the applied Graphic Style.

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Before you begin download the images for the tutorial

Tip 1: Black and white Photo with Color

After you download the picture of the lady laying on a bed with a flower, open it in photoshop.

Duplicate the image

Now make the top image black and white by using the keyboard shortcut ctrl+shift+u. Or you can go image>>adjustments>>desaturate on your top photoshop menu

Now your image should be black and white and you should have a layer underneath it that is still color

Its time to add the layer mask to the black and white layer. So you can click the layer mask icon at the bottom of your layer’s palette or you can go to layer>>layer mask>>reveal all.

Once you do that your layer should look like this

Make sure your foreground and background colors are set to default (black and white)

Get a soft brush around 13px and start painting the flower to make the color show through.

For this to work make sure your foreground color is black.

I zoomed in about 300% with the keyboard shortcut ctrl+ and zoom out with ctrl-.

What if you go over the edges? Well its simple hit “X” on your keyboard to make your foreground color white and paint back the parts you went over.

That is how easy it is to take a color photo, make it black and white, then bring the color back to make your image look professional.

Here is another example

And another example

You can also do the same thing with someone’s eyes if you want them to stand out in a black and white image to add a neat effect. Experiment with this method and
see what you can get!

Tip 2: Adding Depth of Field to an Image

In this next tip I will show you how to easily add depth of field to an image. If you don’t know depth of field is what you see in images when the focus is on one or multiple objects while the rest of the objects in the image are blurred out.

SO open up the wine picture you downloaded previously and duplicate the layer like we did with the other image.

Next we need to add some blur to the image you just duplicated.

You can use about any of the blurs but I like the result the best from the lens blur filter.

So go to filter>>blur>>lens blur

Use these settings or experiment with your own

Now you know what to do, add your layer mask to the top layer and paint away the blur you don’t want in the image. So I will erase the blur from the closest glass so the glass further back will be out of focus.

Do you see the difference on how your eyes see the image now?

Here is what mine looks like

You can also reverse that and put the blur on the closest glass

That is all for this quick and simple tutorial. I hope this shows you some easy techniques you can use in photoshop to achieve some professional results!

Thanks for checking this out!

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It’s always good to be able to articulate design choices to your clients; why you put something where, why you chose the color scheme you did, etc. This knowledge is one of the biggest differences between a designer and a non-designer. But there is a lot to remember when it comes to the realm of graphic design – so much so that it’s pretty much impossible to remember everything from all the theories of graphic design, to web design best practices to Photoshop keyboard shortcuts.

With that in mind, I decided it would be useful for me to have all of the basics of color theory contained in one place – specifically, a cool infographic-esque poster. This way, I can quickly reference things that may have slipped to the back of my mind since design school. The end result is this: The Color Theory Quick Reference Poster for Designers.

The idea is that this graphic can be either printed out or used as a desktop wallpaper. During meetings, phone calls, or any other sort of client interaction, you can reference this poster if you need to – either for your own benefit, or to point something out to your client.

The graphic contains info on:

• the basic color wheel
• passive vs. active colors
• cool vs. warm colors
• subtractive vs. additive color
• color types
• color relationships
• meanings attached to colors
• basic terms pertaining to color

Hopefully this will be as useful to you as I’m hoping it will be to me. Here are the various files for download – please share, but don’t pass off as your own!

• Print-ready, PDF (11″ by 17″, 300DPI)
• Print-ready, white background, PDF (11″ by 17″, 300DPI – click to view)
• 1920X1200 Wallpaper
• 1680X1050 Wallpaper
• 1440X900 Wallpaper
• 1280X800 Wallpaper
• EPS file (if you want to make your own changes)

Enjoy!

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We are using version 1.4 of jQuery and the fancybox plugin (you can also check our CSS3 Lightbox Gallery Tutorial, where we also used fancybox).

You can download the example files and keep the demo site open in a tab so that it is easier to follow the steps of the tutorial.

Step 1 – XHTML

The first step is to create the necessary XHTML structure. The markup in the main demonstration file – demo.php is pretty straightforward, as you can see for yourself from the code below.

demo.php

<div id="main">
<a id="addButton" class="green-button" href="add_note.html">Add a note</a>

<?php echo $notes?>

</div>

It contains the main div, which holds all the notes and limits their movement during the dragging process. The rest is generated dynamically by PHP after running a SELECT query against the database, and after storing the result in the $notes variable as you will see in the next step.

If you click the “Add a note” button on the demonstration site, you will see that a form with a live preview pops up. This functionality is provided by the fancybox, which fetches add_note.html (which contains the form) and shows it within a pop-up.

add_note.html

<h3 class="popupTitle">Add a new note</h3>

<!-- The preview: -->
<div id="previewNote" class="note yellow" style="left:0;top:65px;z-index:1">
<div class="body"></div>
<div class="author"></div>
<span class="data"></span>
</div>

<div id="noteData"> <!-- Holds the form -->
<form action="" method="post" class="note-form">

<label for="note-body">Text of the note</label>
<textarea name="note-body" id="note-body" class="pr-body" cols="30" rows="6"></textarea>

<label for="note-name">Your name</label>
<input type="text" name="note-name" id="note-name" class="pr-author" value="" />

<label>Color</label> <!-- Clicking one of the divs changes the color of the preview -->
<div class="color yellow"></div>
<div class="color blue"></div>
<div class="color green"></div>

<!-- The green submit button: -->
<a id="note-submit" href="" class="green-button">Submit</a>

</form>
</div>

In the form you can fill in the text of the note, your name and choose a color. Providing a way for users to see how their note will appear in the page in real time is a useful addition which serves another practical purpose – when clicking the submit button and the lightbox window closes, the preview note is copied to the main div, which saves us from writing additional code.

Note Creation Form With Live Preview

Step 2 – PHP

As mentioned earlier, PHP fills the $notes variable by running a query againts the database and outputs it on the page. Lets see how this works.

demo.php

$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM notes ORDER BY id DESC");

$notes = '';
$left='';
$top='';
$zindex='';
while($row=mysql_fetch_assoc($query))
{
	// The xyz column holds the position and z-index in the form 200x100x10:
	list($left,$top,$zindex) = explode('x',$row['xyz']);
	$notes.= '
		<div class="note '.$row['color'].'" style="left:'.$left.'px;top:'.$top.'px;	z-index:'.$zindex.'">
		'.htmlspecialchars($row['text']).'
		<div class="author">'.htmlspecialchars($row['name']).'</div>
		<span class="data">'.$row['id'].'</span>
	</div>';
}

The notes table not only stores the text and the author of the note, but it also has a dedicated column for the x and y coordinates, as well for the z-index (or stacking order). Those are stored in the xyz field of the table, which is updated by AJAX.

After the visitor clicks on the “Add a note” button, fancybox grabs add_note.html (which was covered in step one) and displays the live preview form. When it is submitted, the data is sent via AJAX to post.php, given below.

post.php

// Escaping the input data:
$author = mysql_real_escape_string(strip_tags($_POST['author']));
$body = mysql_real_escape_string(strip_tags($_POST['body']));
$color = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['color']);
$zindex = (int)$_POST['zindex'];

/* Inserting a new record in the notes DB: */
mysql_query('	INSERT INTO notes (text,name,color,xyz)
VALUES ("'.$body.'","'.$author.'","'.$color.'","0x0x'.$zindex.'")');

if(mysql_affected_rows($link)==1)
{
	// Return the id of the inserted row:
	echo mysql_insert_id($link);
}
else echo '0';

After escaping all the input data and inserting it in the table, the script checks whether there were any rows affected after the insert query. If mysql_affected_rows returns 1, this would mean that the insert was successful and the automatically assigned auto_increment ID is outputted.

AJAX is also used to save the positions of the individual notes after the end of each movement. The JavaScript code that actually requests these AJAX calls is presented in step 4 of this tutorial. The PHP code is included below:

update_position.php

// Validating the input data:
if(!is_numeric($_GET['id']) || !is_numeric($_GET['x']) || !is_numeric($_GET['y']) || !is_numeric($_GET['z']))
die("0");

// Escaping:
$id = (int)$_GET['id'];
$x = (int)$_GET['x'];
$y = (int)$_GET['y'];
$z = (int)$_GET['z'];

// Saving the position and z-index of the note:
mysql_query("UPDATE notes SET xyz='".$x."x".$y."x".$z."' WHERE id=".$id);

echo "1";

After making sure that the input data is valid, the script updates the xyz field of the row for the note in question and prints 1 on success.

Lets continue with step three.

Step 3 – CSS

All the markup is in place, so it is time to throw in some fancy styling. The styles are defined in styles.css. I divided the file in three parts.

styles.css – Part 1

.note{
	height:150px;
	padding:10px;
	width:150px;
	position:absolute;
	overflow:hidden;
	cursor:move;

	font-family:Trebuchet MS,Tahoma,Myriad Pro,Arial,Verdana,sans-serif;
	font-size:22px;

	/* Adding a CSS3 shadow below the note, in the browsers which support it: */
	-moz-box-shadow:2px 2px 0 #DDDDDD;
	-webkit-box-shadow:2px 2px 0 #DDDDDD;
	box-shadow:2px 2px 0 #DDDDDD;
}

#fancy_ajax .note{ cursor:default; }

/* Three styles for the notes: */

.yellow{
	background-color:#FDFB8C;
	border:1px solid #DEDC65;
}

.blue{
	background-color:#A6E3FC;
	border:1px solid #75C5E7;
}

.green{
	background-color:#A5F88B;
	border:1px solid #98E775;
}

/* Each note has a data span, which holds its ID */
span.data{ display:none; }

/* The "Add a note" button: */
#addButton{
	position:absolute;
	top:-70px;
	left:0;
}

In the first part we define the appearance of the notes and provide three color schemes – yellow, blue and green. Those color classes are also used in the live preview form when creating a note.

Every note has special span element with a class name of data, which holds the internal ID it is assigned in the database. This ID is used by jQuery and returned with the AJAX calls back to the server in order to update the note’s position and z-index.  We are hiding this span from view with display:none.

Three Styles Of Notes

styles.css – Part 2

/* Green button class: */
a.green-button,a.green-button:visited{
	color:black;
	display:block;
	font-size:10px;
	font-weight:bold;
	height:15px;
	padding:6px 5px 4px;
	text-align:center;
	width:60px;

	text-shadow:1px 1px 1px #DDDDDD;
	background:url(img/button_green.png) no-repeat left top;
}

a.green-button:hover{
	text-decoration:none;
	background-position:left bottom;
}

.author{
	/* The author name on the note: */
	bottom:10px;
	color:#666666;
	font-family:Arial,Verdana,sans-serif;
	font-size:12px;
	position:absolute;
	right:10px;
}

#main{
	/* Contains all the notes and limits their movement: */
	margin:0 auto;
	position:relative;
	width:980px;
	height:500px;
	z-index:10;
	background:url(img/add_a_note_help.gif) no-repeat left top;
}

The second part of the file defines the green button class, complete with a hover state and a CSS3 text-shadow. These are a few tiny details that may not look like much, but leave a good overall impression to the user.

styles.css – Part 3

h3.popupTitle{
	border-bottom:1px solid #DDDDDD;
	color:#666666;
	font-size:24px;
	font-weight:normal;
	padding:0 0 5px;
}

#noteData{
	/* The input form in the pop-up: */
	height:200px;
	margin:30px 0 0 200px;
	width:350px;
}

.note-form label{
	display:block;
	font-size:10px;
	font-weight:bold;
	letter-spacing:1px;
	text-transform:uppercase;
	padding-bottom:3px;
}

.note-form textarea, .note-form input[type=text]{
	background-color:#FCFCFC;
	border:1px solid #AAAAAA;
	font-family:Arial,Verdana,sans-serif;
	font-size:16px;
	height:60px;
	padding:5px;
	width:300px;
	margin-bottom:10px;
}

.note-form input[type=text]{	height:auto; }

.color{
	/* The color swatches in the form: */
	cursor:pointer;
	float:left;
	height:10px;
	margin:0 5px 0 0;
	width:10px;
}

#note-submit{	margin:20px auto; }

In the last part of styles.css, we add CSS rules for the live preview form, staring from the H3 heading and finishing with the color swatches on the bottom.

Step 4 – jQuery

jQuery manages the front-end and all of the AJAX requests. In order to be able to use the library, we first need to include a few lines to the head section of demo.php:

demo.php

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="fancybox/jquery.fancybox-1.2.6.css" media="screen" />

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.0/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.7.2/jquery-ui.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="fancybox/jquery.fancybox-1.2.6.pack.js"></script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="script.js"></script>

We include jQuery and jQuery UI from Google’s content repository network, as well as the rest of the css and js files needed for this tutorial. Now lets dig a bit deeper into our jQuery script.

script.js – Part 1

$(document).ready(function(){
	/* This code is executed after the DOM has been completely loaded */

	var tmp;

	$('.note').each(function(){
		/* Finding the biggest z-index value of the notes */

		tmp = $(this).css('z-index');
		if(tmp>zIndex) zIndex = tmp;
	})

	/* A helper function for converting a set of elements to draggables: */
	make_draggable($('.note'));

	/* Configuring the fancybox plugin for the "Add a note" button: */
	$("#addButton").fancybox({
		'zoomSpeedIn'		: 600,
		'zoomSpeedOut'		: 500,
		'easingIn'			: 'easeOutBack',
		'easingOut'			: 'easeInBack',
		'hideOnContentClick': false,
		'padding'			: 15
	});

	/* Listening for keyup events on fields of the "Add a note" form: */
	$('.pr-body,.pr-author').live('keyup',function(e){

		if(!this.preview)
			this.preview=$('#previewNote');

		/* Setting the text of the preview to the contents of the input field, and stripping all the HTML tags: */
		this.preview.find($(this).attr('class').replace('pr-','.')).html($(this).val().replace(/<[^>]+>/ig,''));
	});

	/* Changing the color of the preview note: */
	$('.color').live('click',function(){

		$('#previewNote').removeClass('yellow green blue').addClass($(this).attr('class').replace('color',''));
	});

First the script finds the maximum z-index value, so that it can cache it into the zIndex variable and increment it before assigning it to the notes in the beginning of every drag movement. This way, when you start dragging a note, it is moved to the top of the stack.

Another interesting moment is that we use the jQuery live() method to listen for events, instead of the regular bind(). This is so, because the page elements we are listening for events on, are created only when the form is shown and, once defined, live() event listeners are active on all elements yet to be created.

script.js – Part 2

	/* The submit button: */
	$('#note-submit').live('click',function(e){

		if($('.pr-body').val().length<4)
		{
			alert("The note text is too short!")
			return false;
		}

		if($('.pr-author').val().length<1)
		{
			alert("You haven't entered your name!")
			return false;
		}

		$(this).replaceWith('<img src="img/ajax_load.gif" style="margin:30px auto;display:block" />');

		var data = {
			'zindex'	: ++zIndex,
			'body'		: $('.pr-body').val(),
			'author'		: $('.pr-author').val(),
			'color'		: $.trim($('#previewNote').attr('class').replace('note',''))
		};

		/* Sending an AJAX POST request: */
		$.post('ajax/post.php',data,function(msg){

			if(parseInt(msg))
			{
				/* msg contains the ID of the note, assigned by MySQL's auto increment: */
				var tmp = $('#previewNote').clone();

				tmp.find('span.data').text(msg).end().css({'z-index':zIndex,top:0,left:0});
				tmp.appendTo($('#main'));

				make_draggable(tmp)
			}

			$("#addButton").fancybox.close();
		});

		e.preventDefault();
	})
});

Here we are listening for the click event on the form submit link. Once clicked, the data is validated and sent with the $.post method. If the insert was successful, the lightbox is hidden and the newly created note is added to the page. Notice that we are using the make_draggable function, which is included below.

The Note Position And Stacking Are Saved With AJAX

script.js – Part 3

var zIndex = 0;

function make_draggable(elements)
{
	/* Elements is a jquery object: */
	elements.draggable({
		containment:'parent',
		start:function(e,ui){ ui.helper.css('z-index',++zIndex); },
		stop:function(e,ui){

			/* Sending the z-index and positon of the note to update_position.php via AJAX GET: */
			$.get('ajax/update_position.php',{
				x		: ui.position.left,
				y		: ui.position.top,
				z		: zIndex,
				id	: parseInt(ui.helper.find('span.data').html())
			});
		}
	});
}

In the last part of script.js, we have the make_draggable function. It turns a set of jQuery elements passed as a parameter into draggable objects. I’ve moved this functionality into a separate function because we need to create draggables in twice – once on initial page load, and once when we add a new note to the page.

Step 5 – MySQL

If you plan on running and building upon this demo, you’ll need to set up a working version on your server. You’ll need to execute the code from table.sql of the download archive in phpMyAdmin and fill in your database credentials in connect.php.

With this our AJAX-ed Sticky Note system is complete!

Conclusion

Today we created an Ajax Enabled Sticky Note Management System and demonstrated how we could use one of the readily available plug-ins for the jQuery library to build a dynamic interface, complete with a live preview.

What do you think? How would you improve this code?

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A link is either one color or another. A text field is either one size or another. A photo is either transparent or opaque. No in-betweens from one state to the next. No transitions.

This has led to most web pages feeling abrupt, with elements shifting and changing ungracefully.

Yes, we can use DHTML and leverage the jQuery library for transitions, but this requires a lot of code for something that should be very simple.

What we need is a quick and easy way to add simple transitions to the page and in this article you’ll find useful information about CSS transitions and how to use them.

A few months back, I stuck my foot in my mouth by suggesting that designers should start using the new CSS 3 techniques that allow them to do some of the basic styling that they’ve been pleading for. The only issue: none of them worked in Internet Explorer. Nope, not even IE8.

Some readers felt that suggesting techniques that around 75% of audiences would not be able to see was imprudent.

To those readers I say, ‘Hold onto your hats’, because I’m going to introduce you to another new CSS property that allows you to add transitions to any element with only a couple of lines of code.

CSS transitions are being introduced right now in CSS Level 3 but have already been added as an extension to Webkit. Right now that means they work only in browsers based on Webkit, including Apple Safari and Google Chrome.

Where CSS Transitions Come From

Transitions have been a part of Webkit for a while and are the basis of a lot of the cool things that the Safari UI can do that other browsers cannot.

But the W3C CSS Workgroup resisted adding transitions to its official specs, some members arguing that transitions are not style properties and would be better handled by a scripting language.

But many designers and developers, myself included, argued that these are in fact styles— only dynamic styles, rather than the traditional static styles that so many of us are used to.

Fortunately, the argument for dynamic styles held the day. Last March, representatives from Apple and Mozilla began adding the CSS Transitions Module to the CSS Level 3 specification, closely modeled on what Apple had already added to Webkit.

A Brief Note on Design Enhancements

Before we continue, let me emphasize one point: never rely on styles for website functionality if the styles are not browser interoperable (i.e. available on all common browsers).

One more time for those who missed it: never rely on styles for website functionality if the styles are not browser interoperable.

That said, you can use styles, such as transitions, as design enhancements to improve the user experience, without sacrificing usability for those who cannot see them. This is okay as long as you could otherwise live without the transitions and users can still complete their tasks.

First, a Few Transition Ideas

CSS transitions will not replace all uses of DHTML, but here are a few ways to enhance your design in browsers that support transitions, without ruining it for the rest of your audience.

You will need to view this page in Apple Safari 3+ or Google Chrome to see these transitions work. Both browsers are available in Mac and PC flavors.

Roll-Overs

The most obvious use for transitions is to highlight elements (whether links, tables, form fields, buttons or something else) when the user’s mouse hovers over them. Transitions are a great way to give the page a smoother look.

Example #1

Drop-Down Menus

Pure CSS menus are easy to accomplish, and transitions let you give menus slide-down and highlighting effects.

Example #2

Animation

You can move an object between two points on the page and use transitions to animate its movement.

Example #3

Click & Hold!

Transitions, States and Actions

But hold on a minute there, Tex. Before diving into transitions, we have to understand the various states to which an element can transition.

States define how a particular element currently interacts with the user or the page, and they are specified in CSS using the pseudo-classes. For example, when the user hovers over an element, that element would be styled with the hover pseudo-class.

Transitions work by changing a style over a period of time between different element states. For example, the color value of the default state of an element will pass through intermediate colors in the spectrum before appearing as the color value for the hover state.

A Simple Transition

Let’s consider a simple transition from one color to another when the user hovers over a link. Like any other CSS property, transitions are added directly to the selector that it is to be applied to. The property can then take one of following four values.

CSS property
The property that is to be altered (for example, color). See the table below for a list of all of the CSS properties that can be transitioned.

Duration
How long the transition will last, generally in seconds (for example, .25s).

Timing function
Allows you to control how the duration is timed. Rather than using a simple linear count, you can speed up or slow down the transition or even specify a beat or count (for example, linear). More on this later in the article.

Delay
How long to wait between the action and the beginning of the transition, usually expressed in seconds (for example, .1s). This value can be omitted if you don’t want a delay.

Because the transition property started out as a Webkit extension, we have to include both the transition and -webkit-transition properties for backwards compatibility.

Let’s first add both of these properties to the :hover pseudo-class:

a:hover {
   color: red;
   -webkit-transition: color .25s linear;
   transition: color .25s linear;
}

Now, when a link is hovered over, rather than jumping from blue to red, it will transition for a quarter of a second through the intermediate colors.

Of course, we also want to transition back to the default link color, so we’ll add a transition to the :link (and probably :visited) pseudo-classes, with just a very brief delay (one-tenth of a second) before it fades:

a:link, a:visited {
   color: blue;
   -webkit-transition: color .25s linear .1s;
   transition: color .25s linear .1s;
}

Adding Multiple Transitions

Because a transition is a CSS property, if you add multiple instances of the transition property in the same rule, then the last one will override previous ones, rather than add to them. So in the following rule, the only transition would be the background color:

a:hover {
  color: red;
  background-color: rgb(235,235,185);
  -webkit-transition: color .25s linear;
  transition: color .25s linear;
  transition: background-color .15s linear .1;
}

Multiple transitions are added as a comma-separated list in the same transition property definition:

a:hover {
  color: red;
  background-color: rgb(235,235,185);
   -webkit-transition: color .25s linear, background-color .15s linear .1s;
  transition: color .25s linear, background-color .15s linear .1s;
 }

This will create both a color and background-color transition.

What Can Be Transitioned?

Almost any CSS property that has a color, length or position component, including many of the new CSS 3 properties, can be given a transition. One notable exception seems to be box-shadow.

Straight from the W3C’s Transitions spec, here is a list of CSS properties that can be given a transition, along with the aspects that are transformed. I’ve highlighted a few of the more useful properties.

Transition Timing and Delay

With transitions, you can vary the count rate, counting slower at the beginning and speeding up at the end, vice versa, or anything in between. CSS transitions come with five keywords for transition timing and allow you to specify values for your own timing curve.

A Universal Transition?

Transitions will quickly become standard operating procedure for all websites, enhancing user interface feedback.

To add ubiquitious transitions across your entire website, one option is to add a transition to the universal selector, similar to a CSS reset. This applies a default transition to all elements on the page, allowing you to keep a consistent transition:

*:link, *:visited, *:hover, *:active, *:focus {
   -webkit-transition:
     color .25s linear,
      background-color .25s linear,
     border-color .25s linear;
   transition:
     color .25s linear,
     background-color .25s linear,
     border-color .25s linear;
}

One argument against a universal transition, and indeed against using the universal selector for CSS resets in general, is that applying a style to every element on the page may slow down page rendering. However, I’ve never found any evidence that this is the case. Anyone know different?

Jason Cranford Teague is the author of more than 13 books on digital media, including Speaking In Styles: The Fundamentals of CSS for Web Designers. For more information on CSS and web typography, check out Jason’s new book, Fluid Web Typography. Follow Jason on Twitter: @jasonspeaking.

If you find an exclusive RSS freebie on this feed or on the live WDD website, please use the following code to download it: f2cc9y

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First download these images

Now create a document 1000X600px with a black background

Drag the screaming face to the very right of the new document.

We need to get rid of the grayish color in the image so bring up your “levels” tool by using the keyboard shortcut ctrl+L and use these settings that follow. Basically I am just dragging the middle arrow to the right.

Now for the rest of the grayish color showing up use a medium sized soft eraser brush to get rid of it.

Now its time to make the curvy lines with the pen tool.

So pick your pen tool and make sure the settings at the top of your photoshop window look
like this

If you don’t know how to use the pen tool there are many tutorials that show how to use it and you can search for them on your favorite search engine. I am going to explain how to use it for one line though.

Following are some images showing the steps to creating the curved line

Then click one more time off the boundary of the canvas to finish up.

Make sure you have a white 3px brush chosen. Also in your brush settings make
sure shape dynamics is turned off. Then with the pen tool right click on the line
you made and click, “stroke path”.

After that right click on it again and choose “remove path”.

Now you should have a white squiggly line.

Now in your blending options use these settings:

Color Overlay:

Choose a mid blue color.

Outer Glow:

Now use that same method to make quite a few more squiggly lines.

Then I made some more but used a bright green color

Next I want to add some cloudy/smoky kind of effect in a new layer above all the curved lines.

To do this make sure you have the two colors you have chosen as your foreground and background colors.

Now choose your brush tool and go to your brush settings:

And set your scattering options like this:

Now in the new layer use either color and paint over the lines like this:

Then hit x on your keyboard to change to the other color and do the same thing. Do this all in the same layer. Don’t paint as heavy with the other color.

Next grab your smudge tool from your tools and set its strength to 57%. Smudge the entire layer by taking your cursor and moving it back and forth to get the smoky effect.

After you finish that, duplicate the layer and set it to vivid light so its a little more vivid.

I want to make the smokey effect and the curved lines to look kind of like sound waves and for that effect I will crete a new layer and make a selection with my rectangle marquee tool. Fill the selection with the color black then use the fibers filter.

Then go to filter>>render>>fibers

Use settings similar to this:

Set it to overlay and that is it for that step.

It should look similar to this

Now time to add the abstract stock photos.

Open abstract2 and drag it into your canvas and size it down to fit over what you have so far.

Set the layer to lighten and erase around it to make it blend in better

Duplicate that layer and move it to the left so it looks like one large abstract light.

Now grab the other abstract stock photo and do the same thing with it.

For the layer I duplicated with the second abstract image I want to change its color slightly just to give the work more color.

So on that one I will adjust the hue/saturation by hitting ctrl+u on my keyboard and using these settings:

That will make it a purple color

Next I will use a medium soft white brush and and paint on the mouth area to give more of a screaming effect.

Add some sparks by using the same method we used before in earlier steps with the scatter brush tool. Use the different colors within the abstract light (blue, green, white etc) and paint sparks on the top and bottom. I will do blue sparks, green sparks, and white ones in 3 different layers. Just paint the color sparks where you see each color.

Add outer glows to them that match the color. For example the blue with a lighter blue outer glow and I used a yellowish glow for the white.

This work will not be complete until I add some lightning to it.

Create a new layer and use the rectangle marquee tool again like in the previous steps to create the fibers and make a selection around the abstract lights. Go to filter>>render>>clouds. Then right after that filter>>render>>difference clouds.

Now hit ctrl+i on your keyboard to invert it

Now bring up your level tool like we did on the image of the guy screaming and move the middle cursor all the way to the right.

Set the layer to overlay and use a soft eraser brush to blend it in good and you should have a pretty cool effect.

The final thing I want to do is add a glow to his face since he has all of this light coming out of his mouth, don’t you think it would be making a glow on his face?

So in a new layer get a medium sized eraser brush and paint a bluish color over his face

Set it to color dodge and we are done!

Here is an idea just to show you what you could do with an image like this:

Thanks for checking out this tutorial!

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Online shopping is a great way to economize and reduce the stress of shopping, but shopping online for certain types of products can be harder than shopping in person. Recently, I looked at how well major online retailers (Macy’s, Target and Overstock.com) facilitate shopping for a deceptively complex, though very common, item: a set of 300-thread-count, white cotton sheets for a queen-sized bed. Here’s what I found.

Macy’s

As with all things Macy’s, its website is highly polished and savvy with marketing. The home page is clear and well organized, with categories that are well delineated and prominently displayed. This clarity continues on the “Bed & Bath” landing page, where the “Sheets” option is emphasized, being listed under “Bedding” as well as in the “Featured Categories” on the right. But once they’ve made their big choices, most shoppers will undoubtedly run into problems.

The “Sheets & Sheet Sets” page is a stumbling block. The ways of filtering the hundreds of options in this list are limited, and the filters we find are confusing and inconsistent anyway. Although a prominent “Brand” filter is available, I don’t purchase sheets regularly, and so I don’t have a strong commitment to any one brand (at least not any stronger than I do to color, pattern, material, etc.).

The left navigation menu provides additional options, but these are of limited value. The list mixes promotional navigation (”One Day Sale”) with content (”Sheets Buying Guide”) and filters (”By Threadcount”). The best way to help shoppers narrow down a long list of items is by adding a filtering function, allowing shoppers to prioritize. This page would greatly benefit from a function that allows users to sort or filter based on common criteria such as color, price, size and material.

So, I try the “Sheet Buying Guide,” the link to which is prominently highlighted on the “Sheets” page. The “Guide” is a well-written glossary of terms, but it doesn’t deliver on my expectation of assistance with selecting sheets. Strike two.

Large view

The left column offers more product categories. Because the difference between “Sheet Sets” and “Bed Sheets” isn’t clear, I choose “By Threadcount” as the next best option. Selecting “200-320 Threadcount” reduces the results to a more manageable size. The pictures help me to distinguish the items, making it easy to dismiss patterned sheets and focus on the seven solid-color choices that fit the bill. However, with each item displaying as many as six different prices and four lines of underlined descriptive text, even this small handful of options is difficult to scan. Being able to compile a few options into a comparison table would really help!

Large view

It seems the only way to tell which sheets are available in white and queen size is to check them out one by one. So I start clicking on items. The first looked fine but got poor customer ratings. Seeing the rating on the product page, along the number of people who reviewed and would recommend the item, is helpful, but seeing this information on the results page would have saved me a click.

Large view

The second item might work, but I have to scroll down the page to see the available sizes and prices. Listing the sheet sets of different sizes alongside pillow cases and single sheets makes it a bit hard to scan for what I’m looking for. Also, I notice that printed and solid colors are listed as separate items, making the list longer and more complex than it needs to be. Being able to make my selection in a simple multi-step process would be better (e.g. Step 1: select the size. Step 2: select the color, etc.); either that or combining all of the colors into a DHTML drop-down menu that includes a thumbnail image. I decide to keep looking. The third item is a possibility, but it’s a bit pricey.

The fourth item isn’t available in queen size. The fifth doesn’t come in white. Now I have to remember: was it the first or second one that I liked? I wish I could mark candidates so that I didn’t have to remember (or takes notes). The inconspicuous “Compare to best sellers” link might have been helpful, but it isn’t: items are displayed in a nicely organized table, but they seem randomly selected from multiple product categories, such as mattress pads and pillow cases, and relevant data is missing from the comparison rows.

Moving on, I notice something new on the sixth product page. While previous pages displayed all sizes in a single-item selection list, this one has “Size tabs” at the top of the list. Did I miss this before? Because these tabs are so discrete and appear only on some product pages, I can’t be the only shopper who missed finding the best option for my needs.

Large view

Once I’m ready to make my selection, I scroll down to find… “Add to bag”? Macy’s would do better to stick with the standard “Add to Cart” phrase, and not introduce verbal cleverness—and uncertainty—at the moment a shopper is ready to commit to the sale. I click this, and the page refreshes with an error message at the top of the page. I’ve forgotten something, though the message isn’t specific about whether I omitted color, size or item type. I need to scroll down to learn that I haven’t entered a quantity. Displaying the error message next to the offending field would be better, or better yet, default the quantity to “1″ when I select an item color.

Large view

I correct the error and proceed, getting important feedback in the form of a pop-up window that confirms my selection, the cost and a running total of items in my bag. Appropriately, two options are presented: “Continue shopping” or “Checkout.”

The check-out page displays a clear and detailed list of items I’ve chosen, with an option to easily change quantities by using a drop-down menu next to each item. Any change quickly recalculates the total cost, including shipping charges and estimated tax, without requiring me to “update” or “save” the change, as one sees on many other commerce websites. At least this part of the process was a good experience.

Large view

Though Macy’s website has many nice features, the most important function of finding the right product is unwieldy at best. The absence of an effective method of narrowing down a list of products to find the item I’m looking for made the experience more difficult than it should have been. Although the high-quality photography makes it quick and easy to scan products, the combination of multiple colors or elements in a single shot sometimes confused me.

Target

I had high hopes for Target, which has done such a great job of transforming itself from a cheap discount chain into an affordable, appealing and style-conscious retailer. I went onto its website hoping it brought its customer focus to the online experience.

The home page is cheery, though a bit overwhelming. Colorful graphics and promotional headlines vie for attention and thus decrease the prominence of the main navigation a bit. On mouse roll-over, the main navigation pops up a list of categories and sub-categories. For my purposes, “Home” seemed the best option, and “Bed + Bath” the most logical choice. But then I notice a “Bedding” category in the promotional rotating carousel, which looks more relevant. Big mistake. There’s nothing there about sheets. I’ve landed in the seasonal section for some reason.

Large view

I return to my first choice, selecting “Bed + Bath” from the main navigation. This page has several other overlapping categories, such as “Bedding collections” and Home bedding basics.” I have to look hard to find “Sheets” under “Bedding Basics” just above the fold.

Large view

The “Sheets” page looks friendly, with bright-colored dots and a “Shop by color” option front and center. A quick scan reveals several other obvious filtering possibilities: I can also shop by “Material” or, on the left side, by “Color” (again), “Fabric,” “Special sizes,” “Thread count,” “Type,” or “Brands + designers.” Although I’m not sure what the difference is between the two colors, I choose the “White + Cream” color dot.

Large view

The “Results” page has a clean appearance, with various options for displaying items: as a thumbnail grid (the default) with larger images or as a list; although these options are indicated by icon and are not immediately obvious. I can also sort by such useful attributes as price and rating. A single price range is displayed for comparison. And knowing how much credence to give a rating is easy with the number of reviews indicated.

But there are too many items to sort through. I choose “300 thread count” from the filters in the left column, expecting the results to reduce to a manageable number. Instead, I get a whole new list of results, in all colors. Stranger still, bedskirts and duvets also appear in the long list of items. Apparently one can’t combine the color filter with the thread count filter. Not ideal. I guess I’ll have to wade through the list of “white” sheets.

Large view

The “Quick info” pop-up helps a bit, displaying additional information in a pop-up window atop the results page. It’s useful for seeing which sheets are available in queen size. Many of the “sheets,” though, are just pillow cases (too bad I can’t filter these out). In some cases, critical information such as color and thread count are missing, even on the “Full Details” page. One item comes in assorted colors, but I have no way to select the one I want. No wonder it has no reviews.

I find one option I like, but I’d like to compare it with others. I notice an “Add to TargetList” button in the “Quick info” window. I hope this marks the item as a strong candidate so that I don’t have to take notes. Unfortunately, I’m required to “Create a new list” before I can save the item. I want to keep shopping, but perhaps this won’t take long after all: it asks for my name, email address, reason for creating the list… and this is only step one of two! This is too much work. The retailer should let unregistered shoppers use this feature. Relatively few people must cross this high barrier to entry.

Once I’ve made my selection, I see a clear option to “Add to cart” or “Find it at a Target store.” This second feature is very good. It returns a list of nearby stores, showing the availability of the item along with address, phone number, hours and a map link: great if I wanted to do a little pre-shopping. Instead, I choose “Add to cart” to complete my online purchase. My “Quick info” pop-up refreshes, confirming my selection and recommending items that other guests have “shopped for.” Two buttons let me either “View cart + checkout” or “Continue shopping.” Choosing the latter simply closes the pop-up so that I can continue where I left off. Nice.

I liked the Target experience a bit better than Macy’s. Even though I was left with a long list of products to browse on both websites, Target allowed me to drill down a bit further. Also, the “Quick info” window made browsing quicker, freeing me from having to click through to successive product pages, as I had to do on Macy’s website.

Overstock

Unlike many of its competitors that have taken traditional brick-and-mortar businesses onto the Web, Overstock focuses exclusively on its online business. But has it taken advantage of this focus to create a better shopping experience for consumers?

The home page is simple, with a rotating promotional carousel featuring products intended to catch interest. With a specific task in mind, I easily locate the “Bedding & Bath” category among the primary navigation options near the top. On roll-over, a drop-down list presents sub-categories that are sufficiently distinguishable, and I select “Sheets.” So far, so good.

The main “Sheets” page is nice. Overstock.com has obviously considered the needs of the shopper. A set of clear filters displays the number of items in each category. It allows me to apply filters additively, with useful options such as size, thread count, color and material. The effect is a manageable set of relevant options. One nice feature is that the number of results in the unselected categories refreshes automatically whenever a new filter is applied. One can even remove a parameter by simply unchecking a box.

Large view

Another good feature is the prominent display of user ratings for each search result. This makes it easy to compare items without clicking into the full descriptions. But I would also like to see the number of reviews. For me a four-star rating averaged from 10 reviews holds more weight than a single five-star review.

When filtering by color, I expected only solid colors to be returned, but several had a clear pattern. Still, the images made it easy to distinguish between them. Also, I didn’t see any way to set multiple criteria within a category. For example, I couldn’t choose to see all options priced under $50. But price is one of many sort options, so this is less of a concern. And Overstock.com sticks to a single price, regardless of size, which makes items easier to scan; unlike competitors that present a range of prices. Despite minor issues, the page gets me very close to finding my new sheets.

Clicking an item on the results page takes me to a product detail page. At first I’m a little confused. I didn’t expect other products to be shown so prominently here. Then I notice the discrete “People who viewed this also viewed” label above the items in the right column. Seeing other products distracts me from the task at hand. Rather than provide an unobstructed route to my purchase, the website has introduced alternatives—and indecision—at the crucial moment of sale. Also, should I care about items that others have merely “viewed” and not actually bought (bought items being shown lower down on the page)?

I make my decision and select a product. The drop-down menu is fairly long, with all size and color combinations presented in a single list. A more usable interface would be to display these attributes in two separate lists, with the options in the second list updated according to what you select in the first.

Large view

The shopping cart page is presented very clearly, with the options to “Shop more” or “Continue checkout” prominently displayed. But when I decide that I need two rather than one set of sheets, I really have to search to find the “Edit” link. Making the quantity field editable and then updating the total price, as other websites do, would be much better.

I also notice the “Save for later” link. This sounds great for setting aside items that I am not ready to purchase now but might want later. But having to put the item in my cart first doesn’t seem right. I’d much rather be able to do this from the product page, where the function could act as a kind of bookmark, while I continuing browsing.

Now I’m ready to complete my purchase. Once I register, the checkout is contained on one page, with clearly numbered steps. Though a bit overwhelming, a quick scan shows that the page asks for only the necessary information. Moreover, I don’t need to worry about losing my order, which has happened a few times on other websites midway through their multi-page process.

Large view

Overall, using Overstock.com was a positive experience. Despite a few very minor issues, I was able to make my purchase quickly and easily with comfort and confidence. Other online retailers should aspire to its virtues: a concern for the needs of the consumer, intuitive and effective tools and a clean crisp layout.

Shopping Made Easier

It’s clear from my exploration of Macy’s, Target and Overstock.com that a “one size fits all” approach to e-commerce design leads to some user experience challenges when the product category is complex or varied. On the one hand, online stores shouldn’t be obliged to customize the shopping experience for each product category, which would be economically unfeasible. On the other hand, appropriate, well-presented product filtering options go a long way towards ironing out the bumps in an “uncommon” shopping experience.

Interestingly, all three websites I looked at seemed to be constantly changing their design and tweaking the language and navigation options to see what works best. I’m glad to see incremental improvements being made on major retail websites. But given how long these websites have had to improve their processes, it’s surprising more haven’t done so already. Hopefully, as retailers become more aware of best practices and see the value of engaging skilled usability experts, the online shopping experience will reach its full potential as a stress-free alternative to shopping in store.

Further Reading

• Search Results Design: Best Practices and Design Patterns
• Principles Of Effective Search In E-Commerce Design
• 15 Common Mistakes in E-Commerce Design
• Best Practices for Designing Faceted Search Filters
• What People See Before They Buy: Design Guidelines for E-Commerce Product Pages With Eye-Tracking Data
• Revealing Design Treasures From the Amazon

(al)

© Janine Coover, Nick Gould for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: shopping, usability, ux

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I love those minimalist constructions, and I don’t mean that should be a white building to be minimalist. Look this project by H Architects for an example, it is an apartment block in Barcelona, Spain, with an amazing shape, simple windows and looking at the whole thing, even the dark color seems minimalist.

<!–break–>

The building has been made with basalt stone, because of the fact that due to its porosity and texture, it constantly changes in colour and reflection according to the different degrees of humidity. The wood fibers and the gray color playing togheter brings the perfect composition of colors and materials.

The three facades of the building become a single skin that, thank to the continuous use of the stone even in the shutters, unifies the volume and consolidates the characteristic predominance of the massive-wall facades in the old quarter.

In the inside, the shutters are wood-panelled and, once open, evolve from their anonymous presence towards singularity.

Photos by: H Architects

More details at dezeen.com

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you.

A logical and structured layout is the best way to go. Not only because your layout varies between browsers, but also

because CSS has a lot of ways to position every element you have. Today we wanted to share with you some quick CSS code

snippets on how to avoid easy pitfalls when creating your CSS layout, some of the following snippets are cross browsers

while others are not. We thought we could share them only if you are looking for a quick fix.

This is the first part in this series as there are SO MANY good tricks out there and if you see an easier or better

methods, then post a comment below or email me so we add it in this series.

1. Hide text with text indent

h1 {
text-indent:-9999px;/*Hide Text, keep for SEO*/
margin:0 auto;
width:948px;
background:transparent url("images/header.jpg") no-repeat scroll;
}

By Drew Douglass.

2. Cross Browser Minimum Height

#container  { min-height:500px; } * html #container { height:500px; }

“Internet Explorer 6 is the only browser that recongizes the “* html _____” selector and thus is the only browser

of “height” as a min-height. The only drawback to using this code is that it’s not valid CSS.” by <a

href=”http://davidwalsh.name/cross-browser-css-min-height”>David Walsh

Another way to do this and make it valid CSS:

#container{
height:auto !important;/*all browsers except ie6 will respect the !important flag*/
min-height:500px;
height:500px;/*Should have the same value as the min height above*/
}

3. Highlight links that open in a new window

Here’s the CSS to highlight links that open in a new window.

a[target="_blank"]:before,
a[target="new"]:before {
margin:0 5px 0 0;
padding:1px;
outline:1px solid #333;
color:#333;
background:#ff9;
font:12px "Zapf Dingbats";
content: "\279C";
 }

4. Highlight links to PDF and Word files

Here’s the CSSto highlight links that open PDF or Word files without informing the user.

a[href$="pdf"]:after,
a[href$="doc"]:after {
margin:0 0 0 5px;
font:bold 12px "Lucida Grande";
content: " (PDF)";
}
a[href$=".doc"]:after {content: " (DOC)";}

“This will insert either (PDF) or (DOC) after links with an href attribute value that ends in pdf or doc.” by <a

href=”http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200812/reveal_new_window_links_and_links_to_non-

html_files_with_a_user_stylesheet/”>Roger Johansson

5. The order of link pseudo-classes

Eric Meyer

explains why the order matters. So in case you came across the “link-visited-hover-active” (LVHA) rule. This holds that

the four link states should always be listed in that order, like so:

a:link {color: blue;}
a:visited {color: purple;}
a:hover {color: red;}
a:active {color: yellow;}

6. Simple Clearing of floats

One of the simplest and most common layout structures involves the placing of a small, set-width DIV ‘#inner’ within a

larger wrapping DIV ‘#outer’ that contains the remaining content. If ‘#inner’ grows taller than it’s wrapping parent, it

breaks through the bottom edge of ‘#outer’. As we can’t always control the amount of content in these DIVs, it certainly

presents a problem. The markup would be something like

<div id="outer">
        <div id="inner"> <h2>A Column</h2> </div>
        <h1>Main Content</h1>
        <p>Lorem ipsum</p>
</div>

The CSS will look like this

#inner{
width:26%;
float:left;
}
#outer{
width:100%;
}

A simple trick to fix this issue is

by adding ‘overflow:auto’ to the outer DIV

7. Creating a Page Break

Snook share a little CSS trick for those who

run blogs: force a page break before the comments so the users have the option to print the article with or without the

comments. If they print just the article then it can stand alone in a nice clean package.

#comments {page-break-before:always;}

8. Style Your Ordered List

By default, most browsers display the ordered list numbers same font style as the body text. Here is a quick CSS tip on

how you can use the ordered list (ol) and paragraph (p) element to design a stylish numbered list. By <a

href=”http://www.webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/style-your-ordered-list/”>Nick La

The markup would be:

<ol>
  <li>
    <p>This is line one</p>
  </li>
  <li>
    <p>Here is line two</p>
  </li>
  <li>
    <p>And last line</p>
  </li>
</ol>

The CSS to style it:

ol {
  font: italic 1em Georgia, Times, serif;
  color: #999999;
}
ol p {
  font: normal .8em Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
  color: #000000;
}

9. Create Resizable Images With CSS

“I’m a big fan of layouts that still work if a user increases their browser’s text size. However, I was wondering what

it would be like if any images resized along with the text rather than staying constant in size. Would everything seem

more in proportion?” by Christian Watson. To do this, we

need to use a large image and wrap it in a div which was sized in ems. This enables it to be centered within the div

Here’s the HTML:

<div class="resize2"><img src="image.jpg" alt="" /></div>

And the CSS:

.resize2 {
  border: 3px double #333;
  float: left;
  height: 12em;
  margin: .2em 1em 1em 0;
  overflow: hidden;
  width: 12em;
}

.resize2 img {
  margin: -220px 0 0 -210px;
  padding: 6em 0 0 6em;
}

10. Create a Block Hover Effect for a List of Links

The “block hover” effect for lists of links gives the design an elegant effect. we see this all the time now.

“Because IE only supports the :hover element for links, the link anchor needs to go around all the text in the list item.

Therefore, we need to provide some additional hooks in order to style the content. We do this through the use of

<em> and <span> tags.” by Christian

Watson.

Here’s the HTML:

<div id="links">
    <ul>
      <li><a href="#" title="Text">Link Heading One
        <em>Description of link.</em>
        <span>Date posted</span></a></li>
      <li><a href="#" title="Text">Link Heading One
        <em>Description of link.</em>
        <span>Date posted</span></a></li>
    </ul>
  </div>

And now the CSS. In order for the block hover effect to work properly in IE, we need to make the width of the link the

same as that of the list item. Otherwise the hover effect will only display when you mouse over the text within the list

item.

#links ul {
        list-style-type: none;
        width: 400px;
} 

#links li {
        border: 1px dotted #999;
        border-width: 1px 0;
        margin: 5px 0;
}

#links li a {
        color: #990000;
        display: block;
        font: bold 120% Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
        padding: 5px;
        text-decoration: none;
}

 * html #links li a {  /* make hover effect work in IE */
	width: 400px;
}

#links li a:hover {
        background: #ffffcc;
}

#links a em {
        color: #333;
        display: block;
        font: normal 85% Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;
        line-height: 125%;
}

#links a span {
        color: #125F15;
        font: normal 70% Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;
        line-height: 150%;
}

11. Eric Meyer’s Reset CSS

The goal of a reset stylesheet is to reduce browser inconsistencies in things like default line heights, margins and

font sizes of headings, and so on.

/* v1.0 | 20080212 */

html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
b, u, i, center,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	border: 0;
	outline: 0;
	font-size: 100%;
	vertical-align: baseline;
	background: transparent;
}
body {
	line-height: 1;
}
ol, ul {
	list-style: none;
}
blockquote, q {
	quotes: none;
}
blockquote:before, blockquote:after,
q:before, q:after {
	content: '';
	content: none;
}

/* remember to define focus styles! */
:focus {
	outline: 0;
}

/* remember to highlight inserts somehow! */
ins {
	text-decoration: none;
}
del {
	text-decoration: line-through;
}

/* tables still need 'cellspacing="0"' in the markup */
table {
	border-collapse: collapse;
	border-spacing: 0;
}

12. DROP CAPS</h3

According to w3schools only font, color, background, margin, padding, border, float and some other properties can be

applied to the first letter. Still you can make a nice drop cap with CSS

p:first-letter{
display:block;
margin:5px 0 0 5px;
float:left;
color:#FF3366;
font-size:60px;
font-family:Georgia;
}

13. CSS Transparency Settings for All Browsers</h3

“Transparency is one of those weird things that is treated completely differently in all browsers. To cover all your

bases, you need four separate CSS statements. Fortunately they don’t interfere with each other really, so using them all

every time you wish to add transparency is no big hassle and worry-free.” by Chris Coyier.

Transparency is set to 50%

.transparent_class {
	filter:alpha(opacity=50);
	-moz-opacity:0.5;
	-khtml-opacity: 0.5;
	opacity: 0.5;
}

14. Rounded Corners with Border-Radius

CSS3 specification offered us Rounded Corners with Border-Radius, which is currently supported by few browsers. Here is

a snippet:

.container{
    background-color: #fff;
    margin: 10px;
    padding: 10px;
    -moz-border-radius-topleft: 20px;
    -webkit-border-top-left-radius: 20px;
    -moz-border-radius-bottomright: 20px;
    -webkit-border-bottom-right-radius: 20px;
}

14.2 Cross Browser rounded Corner

“Simplest way is to use a giant gif, then I’ll markup my box”- <a

href=”http://www.askthecssguy.com/2007/11/mike_asks_the_css_guy_for_reco_1.html”>Askthecssguy.

<div class="roundBox">
  <p>beautifully-encapsulated paragraph</p>
  <div class="boxBottom"></div>
</div>

CSS would be:

.roundBox {
  background:transparent url(roundBox.gif) no-repeat top left;
  width:340px;
  padding:20px;
}
.roundBox .boxBottom {
  background:white url(roundBox.gif) no-repeat bottom left;
  font-size:1px;
  line-height:1px;
  height:14px;
  margin:0 -20px -20px -20px;
}

15. HangTab. Check out Panic’s website for their software Coda.

Create a Sticky Tag from the Edge of the Browser Window (Even with Centered Content).

#hang_tab {
position: absolute;
top: 7px;
left: 0px;
width: 157px;
height: 93px;
}

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RGBMusicLab is a portable application, available for Windows or Mac, that takes the RGB color values of an image and converts them, based on intensity, into sound. You have a high degree of control over the output of RGBMusicLab. You can adjust the size of the mosaic it creates for pieces of greater or lesser complexity, select from over a hundred instruments and sound effects that the Red, Green, and Blue color values will be represented by, and whether or not the individual color channels will play independently or harmonize, among other options.

The results won’t be a carefully orchestrated concerto, but we certainly had fun loading different types of photos into RGBMusicLab and seeing what the outcome was—Christina Hendrick’s photo, seen above, created a dynamic Broadway-musical-esque number and a photo of a tropical beach yielded a piece that started off fast and furious and then slowed to soothing melody. RGBMusicLab is freeware and available for Windows and Mac OS X.

Have a novel tool for turning one media into another? Created a particularly interesting piece with RGBMusic Lab? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

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Originally posted at The Social

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In this Photoshop web design tutorial, we’re going to learn how to create a slick and minimal-looking website layout. We will use the 960 Grid System as a template to make it easy to align the design elements on the layout.

Preview

Here’s a preview of what we’ll be creating together, click the image to enlarge.

Create a new Photoshop document

1 We’ll be using the 960 Grid System (download it at http://960s/) as a starting template. Once downloaded, ppen up the file called 960_grid_12_col.psd and then hide the group called 12_col_grid.

Creating the background

2 First of all, right-click on the Background layer in the Layers Panel and then choose Layer From Background. This will unlock the Background layer so that it’s editable. I named the Background layer as bg.

3 Now select the Gradient Tool (G), set your Foreground color to #efefef and your background color to #cacaca. Select Radial Gradient as the type of gradient in the Options bar. Drag the gradient onto the canvas so that you have something similar to this:

Designing the header section

4 We’ll add a new horizontal guide at the 50px mark from the top of the document to set our top borders. This will mark the location of the layout’s header section.

5 We’ll start adding our title and slogan; select the Horizontal Type Tool (T) and type your site’s name and your slogan. Here are the font settings I used in the layout:

"YourName"

• Font family: Nilland font (get it from dafont.com)
• Font size: 33pt
• Font weight: Bold
• Anti-aliasing setting: Strong
• Color: #525252

"some awesome slogan"

• Font family: Arial
• Font size: 14pt
• Font weight: Regular
• Anti-aliasing setting: Strong
• Color: #207687

6 Align the fonts on the left top, using your guides for accurate placement.

Creating our navigation

7 Select the Horizontal Type Tool (T) and type the navigation text (home, about us, services, portfolio, and contact) using the following font settings:

• Font family: Arial
• Font size: 17pt
• Font weight: Regular
• Anti-aliasing setting: Strong
• Color: #525252

8 Use the document’s guides to align the navigation link text like the following image:

Creating the search bar

9 Now it’s time to create the search bar that’s situated on the right of the navigation links. Select Rounded Rectangle Tool (U), set the Radius option value to 5px, and then draw the rounded layer shape onto the canvas such that it has 155px width and 20px height, and located at the right of the navigation links.

10 Add an Inner Shadow layer style by double-clicking on the rounded rectangle shape layer in the Layers Panel to open up the Layer Styles dialog box. Use the following settings below for the layer style settings:

11 Let’s create the GO button now. Create a new rounded rectangle shape with the same height (20px) and Radius option value (5px), but with a width of 30px.

12 Apply a vertical (90 degrees) Linear Gradient layer style onto the Go button, with the left color stop being #2fa9c1 and the right color stop being #207687.

13 And then write any text like "search…" using the Horizontal Type Tool (T) on top of the search bar; use a white color (#ffffff).

14 Using the Custom Shape Tool (U), create a white arrow and align it to the center. I used the custom shape called Arrow 2, which comes standard in Photoshop CS versions. Look for it in the Shape option dropdown menu in the Options bar.

Our search bar should be looking like this:

15 Before we move to the next step, just make sure that everything is well-organized in our document. Here’s a screen grab of my Layers Panel as I was developing the layout:

Creating the separating lines

16 Using the Line Tool (U), Create two 1px lines on top of each other, with the following color values:

Note: There are many ways to set the colors of the line shapes. The first is by setting the Color option in the Options bar before drawing the lines. The other way, if you already drew the lines, is to use a Color Overlay layer style. I’ll let you decide how to do this.

Adding the sub-navigation

17 Type your sub-navigation text using the Horizontal Type Tool (T) using the following settings:

• Font family: Arial
• Font size: 17pt
• Font weight: Regular
• Anti-aliasing setting: Strong
• Color: #787878

18 Make sure that the separating line is centrally aligned between the main and sub-navigation. Here’s how it should look:

Creating the featured designs area

19 We’ll start creating the place where the image of a featured design would be, so we’ll select Rounded Rectangle Tool (U), and we’ll create a rectangle of 335px width and 128px height, and a Radius option set to 5px.

20 Apply a gradient Stroke layer style to it by setting the Fill Type option to Gradient. Modify the gradient colors so that it starts at #31aeca and ends at #2b9ab2.

21 Call this newly created layer photo_holder.

22 Well, let’s add an image of a featured design by going to File > Place. This will open up the Place dialog box where you can select an image to place on our canvas. Pick an image, and then press the Place button when you’re done.

23 Make sure that the layer of the image is above the photo_holder layer; if it isn’t, move it. Right-click on the image layer and choose Create Clipping Mask.

24 Modify the size of the image to fit; you can use Free Transform (Ctrl/Cmd + T). When you’re happy with the size, Make sure that your image is aligned according to the image above, flushed to the right of the layout design.

Add some content to the design

25 Let’s add some content to our design, but before we do that, we have to set our boundaries for our content. To do that, drag two horizontal guides like in the following image.

Add a title and a category

26 Use the following settings for the title and category.

Title (in my case it was "Handstand!")

• Font family: Arial
• Font size: 20pt
• Font weight: Regular
• Anti-aliasing setting: Strong
• Color: #2197b1

Category (in my case it was "Photoshop design"):

• Font family: Arial
• Font size: 17pt
• Font weight: Regular
• Anti-aliasing option: Strong
• Color: #313131

Paragraph content

27 Add your paragraph text, using the following image for reference.

28 Choose the Move Tool (V) in the Tools Panel and select our three text layers in the Layer Panel (hold down Ctrl/Cmd while clicking on them to select all of them).

29 Give them equal spacing using the Distribute top edges option.

Create the slider control

30 It’s time to create the slider control. Start by duplicating the two lines we’ve created for the navigation, and then resizing them (you can use Free Transform to do this). We’ll make the dark line darker, giving it a color value of #777575.

31 Then create a small box rectangle shape using the Rectangle Tool (15px wide and 15px high) and apply a Gradient Overlay layer style to it.

32 Before we move to the next step, we have to organize our layers. Use the following reference image to make sure the layers are in proper order.

Creating the content boxes

33 First off, we need to set our boundaries. Drag a horizontal guide and put it on the slider line. Leave a 50px gap, and then add another horizontal guide.

34 Now select the Round Rectangle Tool (U). Create a rectangle of 260px width and 170px height and a color of #d0d0d0. Call this layer bg_1.

35 Align the rectangle like the following reference image, using the Move Tool (V) to position them accurately.

36 Right-click on the bg_1 layer in the Layers Panel and choose Create Layer Mask from the contextual menu.

37 Select the Gradient Tool (G), set your foreground and background color to Black and White (press D to automatically reset the colors). With a linear gradient, drag from top to bottom until you’re satisfied with the look.

38 Now let’s create the shadow. Duplicate the bg_1 layer. Name the duplicated layer shadow. Place the layer beneath the bg_1 layer. Then apply a Color Overlay layer style with a dark gray color (#3e3e3e).

39 While having the shadow layer selected, go Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Set the Blur Radius to 5.0px.

40 Using Gradient Tool (G), adjust the layer mask until you have something like this:

41 Add some content to the box. Below, you’ll see what I ended up with.

42 Group the content layers that you created into a group called content.

43 Now we want to align it. Select the content group, hold down the Ctrl/Cmd key, and select the bg_1 layer in the Layers Panel. Choose the Move Tool (V), and click on the Align horizontal centers option and the Align vertical centers option to position them.

44 Now make two copies of this box by duplicating the layers of the original content box we just created. Align them, change the content, and don’t forget to add a horizontal guide at the bottom.

45 Let’s check back and make sure that all of our layers are organized; use the screenshot of my layers as reference.

Creating the main content area

46 Leave a 50px gap and drag a new horizontal guide. Start adding your content and align it according to the following image.

47 Let’s make it look a bit better. We’ll select Rectangular Marquee Tool (M). In the Style option, choose Fixed Size with a fixed width of 15px and a fixed height of 30px. Set your foreground color to #12197b and fill the rectangular marquee selection with the color (Press Ctrl/Cmd + Backspace to fill).

48 Using the same settings, you can add some content in the right side.

49 Drag a new horizontal guide at the bottom. Add a separating line; use the following image for reference.

50 Check back to see all your layers are organized, using the following image as reference.

Creating footer area

51 We’ll start with the footer area creation by (again) creating a new horizontal Guide. Leave a 50px gap between the guide above, and drag a new horizontal guide!

52 Select the Single Row Marquee Tool (M). Set your foreground color to white (#ffffff). Click on the canvas to create the marquee selection. Then press Ctrl/Cmd + Backspace to fill it. Call this layer 1px_upper_line.

53 Select Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and create a rectangle of 1020px width (it spans the entire width of the canvas, and 160px height. This will be the background of the footer area. Fill it with any color. Apply a Gradient Overlay layer style to it using the following settings.

54 Duplicate the 1px_upper_line layer and move it to the bottom of the footer, call it whatever name you want, but I’ve called mine 1px_down_line. Here’s how it looks.

55 Start adding some content; use the following images for reference:

56 You can download the social media icons from deviantART – they’re called Aquaticus.Social by Junwei.

57 Align them like in the following image:

Creating the small footer

58 Drag a new horizontal guide at the bottom of the big (brown footer), leave a 50px gap, then add a new horizontal guide.

59 Then write your footer navigation text like so:

60 Write the copyright text and align it to the right, add a final horizontal guide.

Adjusting the canvas size

61 Finally, we need to leave another 50px gap between the footer navigation, copyright text and the borders in order to do that, we’ll adjust our canvas size.

Conclusion

And there we have it! We’ve created a clean and minimal layout design!

Download source file

You want a PSD copy don’t you? Here’s a ZIP archive that contains a PSD, and a JPG preview, get it now!

• slick-minimal-layout.zip (4.97MB, ZIP)

Related Content

• Create a Winter Theme Web Design in Photoshop
• Create an Animated “Call to Action” Button
• Design a Minimal and Modern Portfolio Layout with Photoshop
• Related categories: Tutorials and Web Design

About the Author

Mahmoud Khaled a web and graphics designer from Egypt. He’s also a blogger and tutorial writer. At a young age of 15, he already shows skills equivalent to his much older counterparts. Send him a tweet @Mkhaled1, connect with him on Facebook, and visit his site and blog called mkhaled.com.

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Retro design is always nice to be applied to posters, as the design can match with varies of object and topics. Basically, you need to define the right color and style to match with your presented object. After that, you can further figure out how to stand out the object like this tutorial does for the vehicle using retro design.

(View This Tutorial)

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There are a whole host of ingredients that contribute to a good email marketing campaign. Permission, relevance, timeliness and engaging content are all important. Even so, the biggest challenge for designers still remains building an email that renders well across all the popular email clients.

Same same, but different

Before getting into the details, there are some uncomfortable facts that those new to HTML email should be aware of. Building an email is not like building for the web. While web browsers continue their onward march towards standards, many email clients have stubbornly stayed put. Some have even gone backwards. In 2007, Microsoft switched the Outlook rendering engine from Internet Explorer to Word. Yes, as in the word processor. Add to this the quirks of the major web-based email clients like Gmail and Hotmail, sprinkle in a little Lotus Notes and you’ll soon realize how different the email game is.

While it’s not without its challenges, rest assured it can be done. In my experience the key is to focus on three things. First, you should keep it simple. The more complex your email design, the more likely is it to choke on one of the popular clients with poor standards support. Second, you need to take your coding skills back a good decade. That often means nesting tables, bringing CSS inline and following the coding guidelines I’ll outline below. Finally, you need to test your designs regularly. Just because a template looks nice in Hotmail now, doesn’t mean it will next week.

Setting your lowest common denominator

To maintain your sanity, it’s a good idea to decide exactly which email clients you plan on supporting when building a HTML email. While general research is helpful, the email clients your subscribers are using can vary significantly from list to list. If you have the time there are a number of tools that can tell you specifically which email clients your subscribers are using. Trust me, if the testing shows almost none of them are using a client like Lotus Notes, save yourself some frustration and ignore it altogether.

Knowing which email clients you’re targeting not only makes the building process easier, it can save you lots of time in the testing phase too. For the purpose of this article, I’ll be sharing techniques that give the best results across all of the popular clients, including the notorious ones like Gmail, Lotus Notes 6 and Outlook 2007. Just remember that pixel perfection in all email clients is a pipe dream.

Let’s get started.

Use tables for layout

Because clients like Gmail and Outlook 2007 have poor support for float, margin and padding, you’ll need to use tables as the framework of your email. While nested tables are widely supported, consistent treatment of width, margin and padding within table cells is not. For the best results, keep the following in mind when coding your table structure.

Set the width in each cell, not the table

When you combine table widths, td widths, td padding and CSS padding into an email, the final result is different in almost every email client. The most reliable way to set the width of your table is to set a width for each cell, not for the table itself.

1. <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" border="0">
2. <tr>
3. <td width="80"></td>
4. <td width="280"></td>
5. </tr>
6. </table>

Never assume that if you don’t specify a cell width the email client will figure it out. It won’t. Also avoid using percentage based widths. Clients like Outlook 2007 don’t respect them, especially for nested tables. Stick to pixels. If you want to add padding to each cell, use either the cellpadding attribute of the table or CSS padding for each cell, but never combine the two.

Err toward nesting

Table nesting is far more reliable than setting left and right margins or padding for table cells. If you can achieve the same effect by table nesting, that will always give you the best result across the buggier email clients.

Use a container table for body background colors

Many email clients ignore background colors specified in your CSS or the <body> tag. To work around this, wrap your entire email with a 100% width table and give that a background color.

1. <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" width="100%">
2. <tr>
3. <td bgcolor=”#000000”>
4. Your email code goes here.
5. </td>
6. </tr>
7. </table>

You can use the same approach for background images too. Just remember that some email clients don’t support them, so always provide a fallback color.

Avoid unnecessary whitespace in table cells

Where possible, avoid whitespace between your <td> tags. Some email clients (ahem, Yahoo! and Hotmail) can add additional padding above or below the cell contents in some scenarios, breaking your design for no apparent reason.

CSS and general font formatting

While some email designers do their best to avoid CSS altogether and rely on the dreaded <font> tag, the truth is many CSS properties are well supported by most email clients. See this comprehensive list of CSS support across the major clients for a good idea of the safe properties and those that should be avoided.

Always move your CSS inline

Gmail is the culprit for this one. By stripping the CSS from the <head> and <body> of any email, we’re left with no choice but to move all CSS inline. The good news is this is something you can almost completely automate. Free services like Premailer will move all CSS inline with the click of a button. I recommend leaving this step to the end of your build process so you can utilize all the benefits of CSS.

Avoid shorthand for fonts and hex notation

A number of email clients reject CSS shorthand for the font property. For example, never set your font styles like this.

1. p {
2. font:bold 1em/1.2em georgia,times,serif;
3. }

Instead, declare the properties individually like this.

1. p {
2. font-weight: bold;
3. font-size: 1em;
4. line-height: 1.2em;
5. font-family: georgia,times,serif;
6. }

While we’re on the topic of fonts, I recently tested every conceivable variation of @font-face across the major email clients. The results were dismal, so unfortunately it’s web-safe fonts in email for the foreseeable future.

When declaring the color property in your CSS, some email clients don’t support shorthand hexadecimal colors like color:#f60; instead of color:#ff6600;. Stick to the longhand approach for the best results.

Paragraphs

Just like table cell spacing, paragraph spacing can be tricky to get a consistent result across the board. I’ve seen many designers revert to using double <br /> or DIVs with inline CSS margins to work around these shortfalls, but recent testing showed that paragraph support is now reliable enough to use in most cases (there was a time when Yahoo! didn’t support the paragraph tag at all).

The best approach is to set the margin inline via CSS for every paragraph in your email, like so:

1. p {
2. margin: 0 0 1.6em 0;
3. }

Again, do this via CSS in the head when building your email, then use Premailer to bring it inline for each paragraph later.

If part of your design is height-sensitive and calls for pixel perfection, I recommend avoiding paragraphs altogether and setting the text formatting inline in the table cell. You might need to use table nesting or cellpadding / CSS to get the desired result. Here’s an example:

1. <td width="200" style="font-weight:bold; font-size:1em; line-height:1.2em; font-family:georgia,'times',serif;">your height sensitive text</td>

Links

Some email clients will overwrite your link colors with their defaults, and you can avoid this by taking two steps. First, set a default color for each link inline like so:

1. <a href="http://somesite.com/" style="color:#ff00ff">this is a link</a>

Next, add a redundant span inside the a tag.

1. <a href="http://somesite.com/" style="color:#ff00ff"><span style="color:#ff00ff">this is a link</span></a>

To some this may be overkill, but if link color is important to your design then a superfluous span is the best way to achieve consistency.

Images in HTML emails

The most important thing to remember about images in email is that they won’t be visible by default for many subscribers. If you start your design with that assumption, it forces you to keep things simple and ensure no important content is suppressed by image blocking.

With this in mind, here are the essentials to remember when using images in HTML email:

Avoid spacer images

While the combination of spacer images and nested tables was popular on the web ten years ago, image blocking in many email clients has ruled it out as a reliable technique today. Most clients replace images with an empty placeholder in the same dimensions, others strip the image altogether. Given image blocking is on by default in most email clients, this can lead to a poor first impression for many of your subscribers. Stick to fixed cell widths to keep your formatting in place with or without images.

Always include the dimensions of your image

If you forget to set the dimensions for each image, a number of clients will invent their own sizes when images are blocked and break your layout. Also, ensure that any images are correctly sized before adding them to your email. Some email clients will ignore the dimensions specified in code and rely on the true dimensions of your image.

Avoid PNGs

Lotus Notes 6 and 7 don’t support 8-bit or 24-bit PNG images, so stick with the GIF or JPG formats for all images, even if it means some additional file size.

Provide fallback colors for background images

Outlook 2007 has no support for background images (aside from this hack to get full page background images working). If you want to use a background image in your design, always provide a background color the email client can fall back on. This solves both the image blocking and Outlook 2007 problem simultaneously.

Don’t forget alt text

Lack of standards support means email clients have long destroyed the chances of a semantic and accessible HTML email. Even still, providing alt text is important from an image blocking perspective. Even with images suppressed by default, many email clients will display the provided alt text instead. Just remember that some email clients like Outlook 2007, Hotmail and Apple Mail don’t support alt text at all when images are blocked.

Use the display hack for Hotmail

For some inexplicable reason, Windows Live Hotmail adds a few pixels of additional padding below images. A workaround is to set the display property like so.

1. img {display:block;}

This removes the padding in Hotmail and still gives you the predicable result in other email clients.

Don’t use floats

Both Outlook 2007 and earlier versions of Notes offer no support for the float property. Instead, use the align attribute of the img tag to float images in your email.

1. <img src="image.jpg" align="right">

If you’re seeing strange image behavior in Yahoo! Mail, adding align=“top” to your images can often solve this problem.

Video in email

With no support for JavaScript or the object tag, video in email (if you can call it that) has long been limited to animated gifs. However, some recent research I did into the HTML5 video tag in email showed some promising results.

Turns out HTML5 video does work in many email clients right now, including Apple Mail, Entourage 2008, MobileMe and the iPhone. The real benefit of this approach is that if the video isn’t supported, you can provide reliable fallback content such as an animated GIF or a clickable image linking to the video in the browser.

Of course, the question of whether you should add video to email is another issue altogether. If you lean toward the “yes” side check out the technique with code samples.

What about mobile email?

The mobile email landscape was a huge mess until recently. With the advent of the iPhone, Android and big improvements from Palm and RIM, it’s becoming less important to think of mobile as a different email platform altogether.

That said, there are a few key pointers to keep in mind when coding your emails to get a decent result for your more mobile subscribers.

Keep the width less than 600 pixels

Because of email client preview panes, this rule was important long before mobile email clients came of age. In truth, the iPhone and Pre have a viewport of 320 pixels, the Droid 480 pixels and the Blackberry models hover around 360 pixels. Sticking to a maximum of 600 pixels wide ensures your design should still be readable when scaled down for each device. This width also gives good results in desktop and web-based preview panes.

Be aware of automatic text resizing

In what is almost always a good feature, email clients using webkit (such as the iPhone, Pre and Android) can automatically adjust font sizes to increase readability. If testing shows this feature is doing more harm than good to your design, you can always disable it with the following CSS rule:

1. -webkit-text-size-adjust: none;

Don’t forget to test

While standards support in email clients hasn’t made much progress in the last few years, there has been continual change (for better or worse) in some email clients. Web-based providers like Yahoo!, Hotmail and Gmail are notorious for this. On countless occasions I’ve seen a proven design suddenly stop working without explanation.

For this reason alone it’s important to retest your email designs on a regular basis. I find a quick test every month or so does the trick, especially in the web-based clients. The good news is that after designing and testing a few HTML email campaigns, you will find that order will emerge from the chaos. Many of these pitfalls will become quite predictable and your inbox-friendly designs will take shape with them in mind.

Looking ahead

Designing HTML email can be a tough pill for new designers and standardistas to swallow, especially given the fickle and retrospective nature of email clients today. With HTML5 just around the corner we are entering a new, uncertain phase. Will email client developers take the opportunity to repent on past mistakes and bring email clients into the present? The aim of groups such as the Email Standards Project is to make much of the above advice as redundant as the long-forgotten <blink> and <marquee> tags, however, only time will tell if this is to become a reality.

Although not the most compliant (or fashionable) medium, the results speak for themselves – email is, and will continue to be one of the most successful and targeted marketing channels available to you. As a designer with HTML email design skills in your arsenal, you have the opportunity to not only broaden your service offering, but gain a unique appreciation of how vital standards are.

Next steps

Ready to get started? There are a number of HTML email design galleries to provide ideas and inspiration for your own designs.

• http://www.campaignmonitor.com/gallery/
• http://htmlemailgallery.com/
• http://inboxaward.com/

Enjoy!

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An interesting variance of black and white photos, is when the photographer seeks to embrace the photo and warm it up with a splash of color. This selective color effect can create some of the most brilliant and breathtaking photography ever seen.

Tutorials for this incredible process can be found all over the web, but the trick is always in the choices made by the photographer or artist. This is a true art form. To decide what significant or insignificant part of the photo will create that wow factor is the most crucial part to this process.

After reviewing hundreds of these photos, today we bring you some truly brilliant images for your inspiration and to tempt you into trying this process yourself.

All photographic images are linked to their original artist.

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MS Paint is a drawing tool you can use to create simple or elaborate drawings. These drawings can be either black-and-white or color, and can be saved as bitmap files. You can print your drawing, use it for your desktop background, or paste it into another document. You can even use Paint to view and edit scanned photos.

You can also use Paint to work with pictures, such as .jpg, .gif, or .bmp files. You can paste a Paint picture into another document you’ve created, or use it as your desktop background.

There is no barrier to creativity for as long as there is a passion and thirst to create beautiful artworks. It really does not matter which software or hardware you use, for as long as you have the drive to just do it.

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Inventor and designer Ray Kurzweil has revealed Blio, a new software suite that lets you purchase and read electronic versions of books in full color glory. Blio, if installed on a tablet, could be a strong competitor to traditional eBook readers who’s E Ink displays are limited to grey scale screens.

(…)
Read the rest of Blio Software Revealed [Full-Color Book Reading Software Goes After eBook Readers]

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I designed this wallpaper about 3 months ago for my personal use. I was trying to do something creative with a quote by John Ruskin and decided to make a wallpaper that exhibited a lot of color.

Love Color

Download

Wallpaper Resolutions:

• 1920×1200px
• 1680×1050px
• 1440×900px
• 1280×1024px
• 1280×800px
• 1024×768px
• iPhone

Production & Process

"The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most."
-John Ruskin

I found this quote interesting so I decided that it would make for a good wallpaper. I quickly opened up Adobe Photoshop and got to work. I started with some wavy shapes that I colored purple. I decided to duplicate this shape into different layers and I painfully rotated them into place to fill the entire canvas. I also changed the colors on some of the layers. For the text, I decided to use Rockwell as the main font.

I really like the kinetic typography style so I decided to layout the text based on that style. I was pleased with the final result and this wallpaper actually stayed as my desktop wallpaper for over 3 weeks.

Quick Summary

• Estimated time: 1.5 hours
• Font: Rockwell
• Tools: Adobe Photoshop
• Total Layers Used: 72

Screenshots

Please share you thoughts about this wallpaper on the comments section below. If you liked this wallpaper, please tell your friends by re-tweeting it. You can also subscribe to the RSS Feed.

Related posts:

1. Wallpaper of the Week – Solid
2. Wallpaper of the Week – Shine On
3. Wallpaper of the Week – Desire and Disparity

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Color Scheme Generators

WellStyled Color Scheme Generator – generator of color schemes and palettes to create well balanced and harmonic web pages.

ColorJack – multiple online color scheme generators used by designers.

Colorschemer Online Version 2

4096 Color Wheel – hover over the color wheel to generate the scheme.

Genopal Online – online harmonious color schemes creator.

Unsafe Colormatch – create 24-bit color schemes online.

Color Mixers – RGB remixing tool.

Transparent PNG Generator – create transparent PNG images in any color.

Colordb – powerful color scheme generator.

Not enough? See also…
Colr – generate color from your own images or flickr.
ColorMatch Redux – simple color scheme generator.
ColorToy 2.0 – flash color schemer.
Visibone Colorlab – simple color wheel.
Dhtmlgoodies Color Schemer
Triplecode Munsell Palette – cool flash-based color picker.
Colorsontheweb – offers various color tools.
Gpeters – instant color scheme from Yahoo images.

Color Palette Generators

ColorHunter – new color palette generator from images.

Color Blender – free online color palette for design and matching.

Swatchify – easily create and share your color palette.

Jrm Color Palette Generator – generate a color palette based on an image.

Not enough? See also…
Degraeve – color palette generator from images.
Slayeroffice – simple color palette creator.
I+Like+Your+Colors – web pages color palette generator.
Bighugelabs – create a harmonious color palette from a photo.

Miscellaneous

Colourlovers – well-know community, resources and color trend for color lovers.

ColorCell – finding the most pleasing color combinations.

Colorcombos – web color combinations testing tool for web developers.

IDEO Web Color Visualizer – background and font color comparison tool.

Kolur – color palette gallery.

Typetester – online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen.

Not enough? See also…
Kuler – quickly create harmonious color themes online.
Daily Color Scheme – daily color scheme based on websites.
Whats Its Color – evaluate an image and give you the image’s complementary dominant colors.
Colrpickr – search Flickr photos based on their color.

Further Reading

1. Understanding color in design – by Dustin Brewer
2. Color Theory for Developers – by Jon Shemitz
3. Secrets of Web Color Revealed – by Color Harmony
4. The Power of Color – by Pegie Stark Adam
5. Choosing color combinations – by Veerle
6. Complete Color Matching Guide – worth to read.
7. Color Design Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Using Color in Graphic Design – by Noreen Morioka and Terry Stone Sean Adams

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This is exactly where services such as Facebook Connect step in. They let you dive inside their multimillion user base, skipping that tedious registration process that drives people off. Another benefit is that Connect enables you to communicate user activity back to facebook, which is a great promotional tool.

Today, we will develop a webapp which will allow users to add christmas wishes using facebook connect and share them with their friends. We are using CSS, jQuery, PHP, AJAX and MySQL for data storage.

Feel free to download the tutorial files and continue with step one.

Step 1 – Creating a facebook application

The first step you have to take, is to enable developer functionality for your facebook account.  Providing that you already have a registration, you have to visit the following URL and install the developer application.

After you’ve done that, you’ll need to set up a new application, which will generate a special API key you’ll later have to include in your JavaScript files (more on that in a moment).

For more information on facebook connect, you can watch this great video by the facebook team, and visit the facebook wiki.

Facebook Developers

The main idea is that we are going to allow users to authenticate themselves with facebook connect, and store only their unique facebook IDs in the database as their identity. We are later using Connect to dynamically fetch additional details about the person (such as the profile picture and the person’s name) and insert it directly into the page.

Another benefit of using Connect is that the wish can easily be posted to the user’s wall with a link to your web app – a great way to promote your site.

Step 2 – XHTML

Now that we’ve set everything up, we can start off by laying down the XHTML structure of the site.

The main part of the markup is generated at run time by the PHP back-end and inserted into the page at designated places.

index.php

<div id="main">

<h1 class="tutTitle">Christmas Wishes With Facebook Connect</h1>

<div id="wishesContainer">

<?php
// Outputting the wishes to the page:
echo $wishes;
?>

</div>

<?php

// If this is the first page, show the submit form:

if($page==1):
?>

<div id="addWish" class="wish add">
<div class="stage">
<div class="topIcon"></div>
<div class="profile-pic"><fb:profile-pic uid="1" facebook-logo="true" size="s"></fb:profile-pic></div>
<div class="name"></div>
<div id="share" class="body">

<div class="toggleContent">
Connect with facebook to post a wish<br />
<fb:login-button onlogin=""></fb:login-button>
</div>

<div class="toggleContent" style="display:none">
<form action="" method="post" id="wForm">
<p>
<textarea name="wish" id="wish" cols="20" rows="2"></textarea>
<input name="" id="sbutton" type="submit" value="Submit" />
<label for="cb">Post my wish to facebook as well</label>
<input name="cb" id="cb" type="checkbox" value="1" checked="checked" />
<input name="key" id="key" type="hidden" value="<?php echo $_SESSION['key'] ?>" />
</p>
</form>
</div>
</div>
<div class="clear"></div>
</div>
</div>

On line 9 you can see that we output the contents of the $wishes variable on the page. It holds all the markup formed according to the individual entries in the database (covered in detail in Step 4).

Also worth noting are those unfamiliar fb: tags that you’ve probably never seen before.  Those are special tags used by facebook (hence the fb prefix) and are dynamically replaced with real data from facebook’s severs based on the attributes of those tags.

But in order to use those, we have to insert a special xmlns (XML namespace) attribute in the opening <html> tag of our document:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">

Also you can see the submit form that allows the visitors to add their Christmas wishes to the webapp. Worth noting is that this form is only shown if the user is on the first (or home) page of the site.

Lets continue with the next step.

Christmas Wishes With Facebook Connect

Step 3 – CSS

Functionality is nothing without looks. So lets add in some styles.

All of our styles are positioned positioned in demo.css. I’ve divided the code into three chunks so it is easier to digest:

demo.css – Part 1

body{
	/* Setting default text color, background and a font stack */
	color:#eeeeee;
	font-size:13px;
	background:url(img/flakes.jpg) repeat;
	font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}

h1.tutTitle{
	/* Hiding the H1 - it is only visble by search engines */
	display:none;
}

#main{
	/* The main container */
	margin:15px auto;
	text-align:center;
	width:865px;
	position:relative;
	display:none;
}

a, a:visited {
	color:#0196e3;
	text-decoration:none;
	outline:none;
}

a:hover{
	text-decoration:underline;
}

#header{
	width:100%;
	height:160px;

	/* Setting the background of the header to show in the center of the page
	   and blend seemlessly with the background color: */

	background:url(img/header_bg.jpg) no-repeat #ad0303 center bottom;
	border-bottom:1px solid #d84b4e;
	text-align:center;
	margin-bottom:60px;

	/* Relative positioning, so that the #backToTut div is positioned accordingly */
	position:relative;
}

#backToTut{
	/* Positioning the "Back to the tut" link */
	position:absolute;
	right:30px;
	top:40px;
}

#logo{
	width:880px;
	text-align:left;
	margin:0 auto;
}

.wish{
	/* A common class, shared by all .wish divs */
	padding:10px;
	text-align:left;
	width:600px;
	margin:0 auto 45px;
	position:relative;
}

/* Individual CSS rules for each color: */

.wish.green{
	background:url(img/green_bg.jpg);
	border:1px solid #3ccd1b;
}

.wish.red{
	background:url(img/red_bg.jpg);
	border:1px solid #e9403c;
}

.wish.add{
	background:url(img/blue_bg.jpg);
	border:1px solid #2976BB;
}

The site has a basic structure with a header on the top (the div with an id of header), which takes the full width of the page and the main container, which holds all the content of the site and is centered on the page.

The header’s background is an image with a fixed width (aren’t they all) which fades gracefully to the background color of this same div. This way no matter how wide the visitor’s screen is, they are guaranteed to see a uniform heading section of the site.

You can also see that we’ve defined a general .wish class, which we build on by defining custom backgrounds for the different color classes.

demo.css – Part 2

.profile-pic{
	float:left;
	margin-right:10px;
}

div div.profile-pic img{
	/* Re-designing the facebook avatars */
	border:2px solid white;

	/* CSS3 Box Shadow */
	-moz-box-shadow:0 0 1px #666666;
	-webkit-box-shadow:0 0 1px #666666;
	box-shadow:0 0 1px #666666;
}

a.fbconnect_login_button {
	/* The facebook button */
	display:block;
	margin-top:7px;
}

.stage{
	/* The .stage divs, which hold the text of the wish */
	background:url(img/bg_gwg.png) repeat-y  center top #eeeeee;
	border:3px solid white;
	padding:8px;

	/* CSS3 Box Shadow */
	-moz-box-shadow:0 0 3px #666666;
	-webkit-box-shadow:0 0 3px #666666;
	box-shadow:0 0 3px #666666;

	/* Fixing the peekaboo bug in IE by triggering the
	   hasLayout mechanism with the zoom property */
	zoom:1;
}

.topIcon{
	/* The icons at the top */
	width:128px;
	height:120px;
	position:absolute;
	top:-40px;
	right:-40px;
}

.wish.red .topIcon{
	background:url(img/mistletoe.png) no-repeat;
}

.wish.green .topIcon{
	background:url(img/jingle.png) no-repeat;
}

.name{
	color:#888888;
	margin-left:114px;
}

.body{
	/* Text of the wish */
	color:#555555;
	font-size:20px;
	padding-top:6px;
	margin-left:114px;
}

#addWish .name{
	/* Initially hiding the name field of the comment form */
	display:none;
}

#cb{
	/* The checkbox */
	position:relative;
	top:2px
}

#sbutton{
	/* The submit button */
	background:#155C9C;
	border:1px solid #093F6F;
	color:white;
	cursor:pointer;
	font-family:Arial,Verdana,Sans-serif;
	font-size:12px;
	padding:3px;
}

There is one aspect of Facebook Connect that might surprise you at first – it automatically includes a stylesheet in your page that might overwrite the styles you’ve set up for things such as the user avatars and names.

For this purpose you can use the !important modifier next to your rules (font-size:12px !important;) or do what I’ve done – provide more elements in the description of the classes, which adds more weight to your rules and overrides those of facebook ( div div.profile-pic img instead of just .profile-pic img, line 6).

demo.css – Part 3

#wish{
	/* The textarea */
	border:1px solid #AAAAAA;
	color:#606060;
	font-family:Arial,Verdana,Sans-serif;
	font-size:20px;
	padding:3px;
	width:400px;
	display:block;
}

label{
	font-size:10px;
}

a img{
	border:none;
}

/* Styling the pagination at the bottom of the page: */

.pagination{
	font-size:10px;
	margin:-15px auto 10px;
	text-transform:capitalize;
	width:620px;
}

.pagination a,.pagination a:visited,.pagination span{
	background-color:#F2F2F2;
	border:1px solid white;
	color:#545454;
	display:inline;
	float:left;
	margin:3px 5px 0 0;
	padding:4px 6px;
	text-decoration:none;
}

.pagination a:hover{
	background-color:#eaf7ff;
	color:#444444;
}

.pagination span{
	background-color:#BBBBBB;
	border:1px solid #CCCCCC;
	color:#666666;
}

/* The clearfix hack */

.clear{
	clear:both;
}

p{
	/* The tut info on the bottom of the page */
	padding:10px;
	text-align:center;
}

In the third part of the code, we style the form elements and the pagination, displayed on the bottom of the page.

The Wish Container

Step 4 – PHP

As I mentioned in step one, PHP generates all of the christmas wishes XHTML markup dynamically, after fist selecting them from the database. Lets see how this works.

index.php

// Error reporting

error_reporting(E_ALL^E_NOTICE);

// Including additional files
require "connect.php";
require "functions.php";

// If there is no key, create a new one
if(!$_SESSION['key'])
{
	// Making a new unique key:
	$key = md5(time().$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
	// Saving it to the session. Will be used in post.php;
	$_SESSION['key'] = $key;
}

// The total number of wishes. Used in the pagination:
list($total)=mysql_fetch_array(mysql_query("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM christmas_wishes"));

$results_per_page=5;
$page=1;
if((int)$_GET['page']>1) $page = (int)$_GET['page'];

$start=($page-1)*$results_per_page;

// Selecting the wishes from the database. Using te LIMIT cause:
$res = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM christmas_wishes ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT ".$start.",".$results_per_page);

$wishes='';
$c = '';
$i=0;

while($row=mysql_fetch_assoc($res))
{
	$c='red';
	if($i++%2 == 0) $c='green';
	$wishes .= '
		<div class="wish '.$c.'">
		<div class="stage">
		<div class="topIcon"></div>
		<div class="profile-pic"><fb:profile-pic uid="'.$row["facebook_id"].'" facebook-logo="true" size="s"></fb:profile-pic></div>
		<div class="name"><fb:name uid="'.$row["facebook_id"].'" useyou="false"></fb:name>&nbsp;wished</div>
		<div class="body">'.htmlspecialchars($row["wish"]).'</div>
		<div class="clear"></div>
		</div>
		</div>
	';
}

First we generate a special key which is used to check whether the form has been submitted properly and put it add it as a session variable.

As you can see from the XHTML section of the tut, this key is also inserted as a hidden field inside of the form and is later submitted back to the server along the textual body and other data.

It is then checked whether it corresponds with the key in the session. If it does not, this means that the form was submitted without visiting index.php first (a sure sign of a spam bot).

This technique will also prevent double posting, because the session key is unset after a successful insert in the database.

The form is submitted via AJAX, which sends the data to post.php, which is given below:

ajax/post.php

// Error reporting

error_reporting(E_ALL^E_NOTICE);
require "../connect.php";
require "../functions.php";

if(!$_POST['uid'] || !$_POST['wish'] || !$_POST['key']) die('0');

// Checking to see whether the key is in place:
if(!$_SESSION['key'] || $_SESSION['key']!=$_POST['key']) die('0');

$uid = (int)$_POST['uid'];
if(!$uid) die(err('Please login to facebook first!'));

// Escaping the string and stripping the HTML:
$wish = mysql_real_escape_string(strip_tags($_POST['wish']),$link);

if(mblen($wish)<4) die(err('Your wish is too short!'));

/* Inserting a new record in the christmas_wishes DB: */
mysql_query('	INSERT INTO christmas_wishes (facebook_id,wish)
			VALUES ('.$uid.',"'.$wish.'")');

if(mysql_affected_rows($link)==1)
{
	echo '{status:1}';
	unset($_SESSION['key']);
}
else echo err('Something went wrong. Try again!'.mysql_error($link));

It is pretty straightforward. The variables are validated, the data is escaped and inserted in the database. A JSON object is returned which has a status and text property (the latter is initialized only if there is an error and contains the error message).

There is another PHP file – functions.php, which will not be discussed here, but is worth taking a look. Now lets take a look at jQuery.

The Submit Form

Step 5 – jQuery

Before being able to use the jQuery library, we have to include it into the page.

index.php

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.ak.connect.facebook.com/js/api_lib/v0.4/FeatureLoader.js.php"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.scrollTo-min.js"></script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="script.js"></script>

I included jQuery directly from Google’s AJAX CDN – this enables us to have the benefits of their huge infrastructure and the likely possibility that the library is already cached in the visitors browser.

The next scripts are the facebook connect library, the jQuery scrollTo plugin (which you’ll see in action in a moment) and our own script file.

All of our JavaScript code is located inside script.js. I’ve split the code in two parts:

script.js – Part 1

$(function(){

	/* This code is run on page load */

	/* Showing the wishes, hidden by the CSS. */
	$('#main').show();

	/* Listening for the submit event on the form */
	$('#wForm').submit(function(e){
		addWish();
		e.preventDefault();
	});

	function init(){
		/* Run on page load if the user is logged into facebook */
		$('#share .toggleContent').toggle();

		$('#addWish .name').html('Hi, <fb:name uid="loggedinuser" useyou="false" firstnameonly="true"></fb:name>, add your wish below:').show();
		$('#addWish .profile-pic').children().attr('uid',FB.Connect.get_loggedInUser());
		FB.XFBML.Host.parseDomTree();
	}

	/* Initializing facebook connect */
	FB.init("bcf260ae02d453654be01ec11e2d0aa0","xd_receiver.htm",{"ifUserConnected" : init});

In this first part of the script, we set the code to be run after the DOM has been completely loaded (and all page elements are accessible).

We later define a init() function that displays the submit form and initialize facebook connect (notice the ifUserConnected property – the init() functon is run on page load if the user has logged in previously).

The first parameter of the FB.init function is the API key of the app we created earlier.

script.js – Part 2

var commencing = false;

function addWish()
{
	/* If there is another AJAX process already active stop the function: */
	if(commencing) return false;

	/* Stripping HTML tags */
	var wish = $('#wish').val().replace(/<[^>]*>/g,'');

	if(wish.length<3) { alert('Your wish is too short or empty!'); return false; }
	if(!FB.Connect.get_loggedInUser()) { alert('You are not logged in!'); return false; }

	commencing=true;

	/* Sending the data to post.php */
	$.post('ajax/post.php',{uid:FB.Connect.get_loggedInUser(),wish:wish,key:$('#key').val()},function(msg){

		/* This function is run if the data was successfully sent */
		commencing=false;

		if(msg.status)
		{
			/* If there were no errors */
			if($('#cb').attr('checked'))
			{
				var attachment = {
					name:'Christmas Wishes',
					href:'http://christmas-wishes.tutorialzine.com/',
					description:'What do you wish for this christmas?'
				};

				var action_link='';

				setTimeout(function(){
					FB.Connect.streamPublish(wish, attachment, action_link);
				},1000);
			}

			/* Insert a new wish by duplicating and changing the first wish currently on the page */
			var el = $('.wish').eq(0).clone()

			if(el.hasClass('green'))
			{
				el.addClass('red').removeClass('green');
			}
			else el.addClass('green').removeClass('red');

			el.find('.body').html(wish);
			el.hide().html(el.html().replace(/uid=\"\d+\"/g,'uid="'+FB.Connect.get_loggedInUser()+'"'));
			$('#wishesContainer').prepend(el);

			/* Parsing the fb tags: */
			FB.XFBML.Host.parseDomElement(el.get(0));

			el.fadeIn('slow');

			/* Scrolling the page to show the newly added wish into view: */
			$.scrollTo(el,800);
			$('#share').html('Thank you!');
		}
		else
		{
			alert('There was an error trying to add your comment!\nPlease try again in a few moments.');
			return false;
		}
	},'json')
}
});

The second part of the code holds the addWish() function which posts the data via AJAX.

You can see that I’ve used a variable called commencing to figure out whether there is an active transfer in the progress, which allows only one AJAX call at once (and thus preventing unnecessary double-posting caused by multiple clicks on the submit button).

Also, you can see on line 39 that I’ve used the jQuery ScrollTo plugin to scroll the window smoothly so that the newly inserted element is in view.

Step 6 – MySQL

In order to make this work on your own server, you’ll need to create the christmas_wishes MySQL table by running tables.sql, which is included in the download archive.

You’ll have to change your MySQL credentials in connect.php and replace the API key used in script.js with your own.

With this our Christmas Wishes webapp is complete!

Conclusion

Today we created a fully blown webapp which implemented facebook connect. You are free to build upon this source code and use it in your own personal or commercial projects.
Have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

What do you think? How would you modify it this code?

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Not every project needs bland corporate blue to look professional. Planning color means creating a framework that describes which colors to use and how to use them.

Color is the slipperiest design element. “Good” color is so closely tied to elusive things like personal taste and intuition, as well as technical considerations such as contrast and monitor calibration.

But color is vital to content. If you consider a website important enough to spend time refining, then readers will likely consider it important enough to spend time reading. Good color choices make that happen.

In this article we’ll review some techniques to achieve beautiful color palletes for your web designs.

The best way to make a website look unplanned is to choose its colors at random.

Even when visitors skim a website’s home page for the first time, the colors influence their attitude towards the content. Is this website exciting? Reassuring? Daring? Bland? Political? Formal?

Color affects how people interpret what they see as much as typography.

Finding the right colors isn’t easy, but the process can be systematic.

Good design strategy involves a color scheme (i.e. a range of colors selected to communicate a mood or message) and an arrangement of that scheme.

Let’s say you’ve been asked to design a professional website. (And this could very well turn into a drinking game: take a shot every time the client uses the word “professional,” “clean” or “modern.” Two shots for “I like this other website. Copy it.”).

The color scheme will depend on the particular nature of the website. For example, both banks and florists can have professional-looking websites.

But people might be less inclined to buy flowers from a website that is corporate blue and ocean gray. And imagine the Bank of America website in lilac and yellow-green.

A “professional” design tell visitors that they’ve found a website that takes its subject seriously, even if that subject is light-hearted. Whatever the hues and values, “professional” means coordinated, planned and thought out.

Go Grayscale

The best way to work with color is to start with none.

Removing color from a design reveals fundamental problems that should be addressed before worrying about which shade of chartreuse works best. If the design doesn’t feel right in black and white, then it’s time to make changes.

Does each page have a clear purpose? Does the design guide readers through the content? Is the content compelling, inspiring or informative? Are the headings clear? Do the links contrast with the other text? Color improves these effects, but problems in layout, type and organization can’t be solved by color alone.

To do a redesign, first suck out the color. The simple act of washing out over-saturated primaries really shows where a website stands. (Actually, you should really start a redesign by re-evaluating your goals and content, but that’s another story.)

Sometimes removing color is a solution in itself.

I once worked with a Web design company to redesign their own website. The owners were personal about the project and keen to get it right. But if you think designing for yourself is difficult, try doing it by committee. By the end, the three of us were staring at a screenshot of the ninth draft after-hours over a few drinks.

Abruptly, I flattened the Photoshop layers and hit “Desaturate” turning the vibrant copper-and-navy design into shades of gray. To everyone’s surprise, it worked.

By the end of the week, we had a “warm” gray design with red accents. We knew we had a winner when previous clients complimented them on the new look and more calls came in from prospective clients.

Analyze your color scheme with the Photoshop “squint” test:

1. Take screenshots of at least three pages from your website. Open them in Photoshop.
2. Duplicate the background layer in each screenshot (Layer → Duplicate Layer, or Command + J on a Mac, or Control + J on Windows).
3. Apply a Gaussian blur of about 10 pixels to the new layers.
4. Go to Image → Adjustments → Posterize. Use 8 to 12 levels or go to Filter → Pixellate → Mosaic. Use 15 to 30 pixels.

This shows which colors are really dominant. The more dominant the colors, the more heavily the scheme is imprinted in the visitor’s mind.

Once the website’s layout and organization work without color, it’s time to choose a palette. But which one? And how much to use?

Align Your Hues

Color has three properties: hue, saturation and value (sometimes called lightness).

Saturation is how rich a hue is: neon colors are very saturated, while pastels are less saturated.

Value denotes how bright (i.e. how close to black or white) a color is.

Hue refers to which part of the rainbow a color belongs to, such as red or green; it’s the property that people trip up on.

Nothing kills a color scheme like clashing hues. A design can have a hundred shades of one hue, from pastel to neon, and still look planned. But if hues are mixed the wrong way, the scheme falls apart.

One way to avoid clashing hues is by separating them with a third color. A buffer of black, gray or white is safest, because grayscale is hue-neutral: you can coordinate any part of the rainbow with black, white and gray.

A second solution is to use the hues in different proportions. If a color scheme has, say, violet and brown, then the design could have many shades of brown with a few bright violet highlights.

Another option is to vary the values. Pure blue and bright cyan make a so-so combination, but dark blue (navy) and light cyan (sky blue) contrast enough to set each other off. Red and violet can be different enough not to clash but close enough not to look intentional. Light red (pink) and a dark violet bring distinction.

Unfortunately, avoiding a bad color combination isn’t the same thing as choosing a good one. A color scheme is successful not when you’re satisfied, but when your audience feels comfortable.

Discover Great Schemes

Where do great color schemes come from? With hundreds of colors and thousands of combinations, how do you decide?

Designers of small static websites should draw color from the content. That usually means photos.

The design of an eight-page website that I recently built was topped with an elaborate metal scaffold set against an indigo sky. Setting Photoshop’s eyedropper tool to a 5×5 average, I sampled the darkest and lightest parts of the sky and gave the sidebar, links, headings and footer those few shades.

When the client asked how we were able to design a website so well—and so quickly—our response was, “This is what we do.” But the color was already there. I just had to look for it.

While stock photos works for quick websites, designers of larger and more dynamic websites should seek inspiration from their audiences.

An excellent indicator of which colors are attractive to your audience is their daily clothing. Find out what your visitors wear, and you’ll know what colors make them comfortable. If your website is about, say, league sports, find out what people wear to games, rather than their day jobs.

If you’re lucky enough to get photos of your target audience, view them en masse; you want an average of the crowd. But if photos aren’t available, go shopping.

Clothing designers who are able to stay in business have excellent color sense for every mood and lifestyle. It doesn’t have to be 5th Avenue haute couture. A Google search for “camping stores,” “baby clothes,” “ski and swimwear” and “casual living” will reveal many good color combinations.

People wear clothes according to their tastes. If you use colors that they like, they’ll feel more comfortable on your website.

Use Textures

Slight variations in hue, saturation or value create textures.

Monochromatic textures (i.e. textures with only one hue) and patterns provide subtle dimension to most websites without clashing.

Simple texture backgrounds, in particular, are easy to build:

• Take a photo of an interior wall, or something that is bare but feels rough.
• Open it in Photoshop.
• Duplicate the background layer and call it “texture 1.”
• Fill the background layer with colors from your color scheme.
• Set the “texture 1” layer’s blend mode to “”Soft Light” and its opacity to 30%.
• Try it out on your website. If it doesn’t look right, play with the layer’s opacity.

The layer’s name is deliberate. You might play around with more than one photo, but avoid giving the layers names like “wall texture” or “paper texture.” You want to focus on the effect on your website, not where it came from.

Creating a Good Scheme

A good color scheme has certain characteristics. Think of it as a framework or set of guidelines to keep a design consistent. The scheme should:

• List two to five hues that work well together,
• Describe how far a design can vary from those hues,
• Account for shades of each hue,
• Work well against black and white.

Here’s an example:

The designer began by choosing mostly warm hues that felt right. There was no logic, just the vague goal of “autumn” and her intuition.

In Photoshop, two layers provided shades of black and white. Each layer’s blend mode was set to “Soft Light.” Pure black was too dark for the right-most color, so the black layer’s opacity was adjusted.

To unify the colors, a new layer was created and filled with pure red. Its blend mode was set to “Color” and its opacity cut to about 40%. (Note: the order of layers is very important. Colors will change if the “tint” layer is set below the black-and-white layers.)

This gave the designer 15 colors to choose from. She picked four that had a range of tones and hues. Here, the colors are set against white.

Variations are important, so the designer experimented. What would the colors look like against black? What happens if we shade them slightly?

What if we changed them altogether? Using Image → Adjustments → Hue/Saturation on the “tint” layer creates a distinctly un-autumn feel, but the colors are still coordinated. Perhaps that palette can be used for Easter.

The end result is a color scheme: a reference that provides different (but not too different) hues and a range of shades that work well together. Download the sample file.

Use the Framework

Will tomorrow’s graphics, photos and icons work with today’s color scheme? What images will a website need in six days, six weeks or six months? It’s hard to say, but content is a part of your color scheme.

You could solve this problem by either making your images follow the color scheme or making the color scheme follow your images.

Enforcing your color scheme, even with photos, is a great way to achieve a unified look across all pages.

The easiest solution is to find images that fit your scheme. Remember that a color scheme allows for wiggle room: as long as an image’s major hues fit, the image should work. Many stock photo websites let you search by color (meaning hue: usually primaries like red, green and blue).

If an image doesn’t fit your color scheme, give it a tint:

1. Open the image in Photoshop.
2. Create a new layer. Set its blend mode to “Color.”
3. Fill that layer with one of the colors from your palette, preferably the one that most closely matches the image.
4. Set the color layer’s opacity to 50%.
5. Play with the opacity until you get a good balance between the image’s original color and your website’s color palette.
6. This technique works for photos, illustrations and icons—anything pixel-based. (If you don’t own the image, be sure to obtain permission before altering it. You may be improving its appearance on your website, but you’re still taking liberties with someone else’s art.)

Looking Professional

No set of colors looks “professional” in and of itself. Rather, you have to follow a process to reach a coordinated, planned feel.

No matter what the website is about, the audience will know it takes itself seriously.

Tips

• When you think you have a good color scheme, try it out for at least one week. Evaluating color requires intuition that builds over time. Give yourself time to fully absorb the scheme’s personality.
• When you think you have a good color scheme, don’t let it go stale. Your visitors’ tastes, like yours, change over time. Make a note to review the colors after four months. Then ask, are they still appropriate? If not, what has changed? What factors will influence your adjustment?
• Use brilliant colors sparingly. A splash of something iridescent will draw visitors there, but if they see it everywhere, they’ll wander aimlessly.
• Some people think color schemes have a narrow range. Allow some leeway to give your designs added depth.
• Avoid pure primaries such as red, green, blue and yellow. Give them a tinge for real character: red, but slightly violet, blue with a touch of green, “warm” yellow with an orange tint.
• Make sure your colors work when faded. If you choose red, be aware that light red can be feminine and dark red can look like rust or blood. Yellow runs from faded sunlight to dark brown. Dark blue is mysterious, and light blue is tranquil—or electric if you oversaturate it.
• Mac users, set your screen. Go to “System Preferences” and click “Universal Access.” Set your display to “Use grayscale.” This also comes in handy when you’re in the mood for film noir.
• No matter how active you want your website to feel, use a neutral background. Black, white and gray work well with almost every hue.
• If you want small text (say, 14 points or less) to match a large field of color, make the text a few shades darker than normal. This will offset the light counters inside the characters.
• Use more shades of fewer hues.
• What “looks good” is intuitive. But intuition is a battle between your ego, your audience’s pickiness and the authority of the people funding the project.
• Use muted backgrounds to make content stand out:

  
  

  

Written exclusively for WDD by Ben Gremillion. He is a freelance web designer who has learned that a deadline’s inflexibility is inversely proportional to the number of features requested at the last minute.

How do you create successful color schemes?  What works and what doesn’t work for you?

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Color Scheme Designer

Color Scheme Designer is a brand new interface, as well as the engine, all rewritten from the scratch. Rapidly increased precision and color space conversions, better preview, enhanced scheme creation system, unique scheme IDs and permanent URL of the scheme.

The Color Wizard

The Color Wizard is a color matching application for anyone who wants to create designs with great looking colors.

Contrast-A: Find Accessible Color Combinations

The application allows users to experiment with color combinations, examine them under the aspect of accessibility guidelines and to create custom color palettes.

Kuler

The web-hosted application for generating color themes that can inspire any project. No matter what you’re creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community.

Colors On The Web

Spin the color wheel and get a selection of three random colors. The color wheel randomizes among some 16 million colors. And since each spin produces three different colors, that gives endless combinations. (or 2 to the power of 70 or so, which is a very large number). Enough to keep anyone busy for a while.

Color Wheel Color Calculator

The Sessions Color Calculator is an interactive color wheel that helps designers select HTML, RGB, or CMYK colors and identifies color harmonies and schemes. Our Color Wheel works faster than any other color wheel or html color chart.

Infohound Color Schemer

This color schemer is a simple tool to help you experiment with various color schemes for your next web or print project.
Click around within the shaded box to set the saturation and brightness, or within the rainbow to set the hue. You can also enter a particular value directly into one of the boxes.
Matching colors will be automatically chosen. You can click on one to set it as the primary color.

Check My Color

It is a tool for checking foreground and background color combinations of all DOM elements and determining if they provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits.

Hex Color Scheme Generator

This is a great tool to use if you want to develop a matching color scheme for your site. Say you want your nav color to be #000066 (navy blue) and you want to know what colors would go best with it, this tool will help you.

Color Combinations and Color Schemes

Here you’re sure to find the perfect color combination for your project. This site was built to help web developers quickly select and test website color combinations.

Instant Color Scheme

Let Yahoo pick your color scheme! Enter a word or phrase and I’ll grab 5 related images from Yahoo Images, and get the 6 most prominent colors from each.

Toucan Color Palettes

Used alone or in conjunction with our other creation tools, Toucan gives you the features you need to inject color into your creative process.

Pictaculous

Ever wonder what colors to use with an image? Upload your image – get a color pallette

Daily Colorscheme

Daily Color Scheme is all about color. Every day color, they serve a new colorscheme every day of the year, to keep the designers head fueled with inspirational and usable color schemes.

Slayeroffice Color Palette Creator

It will create 10 shades of the base color, located top-left, at varying degrees of opacity. The top row emulates opacity over a white background, the bottom over black (or colors of your choosing as of v1.4). The opacity values are 100% opaque, 75%, 50%, 25% and 10% on the top row. The bottom row begins at 85% rather than 100% and continues on as the first.

Color Palette Software

COPASO is an advanced color palette tool that helps you create the perfect color schemes and themes. With a scratch pad to save colors you’re working with, a photo tool to extract colors and an advanced color picker and color theory wheel to give you tons of color inspiration. Using COPASO you can save your palettes to a private folder or download them to your local computer.

Color Palette Generator

Enter the URL of an image to get a color palette that matches the image. This is useful for coming up with a website color palette that matches a key image a client wants to work with.

Color Palette Generator

Generate a color palette based on an image.

CSS Drive’s Image to Colors Palette Generator!

Upload an image to generate a color palette based on the image’s primary colors. Useful for quickly grabbing a particular color within an image for inspiration.

The Color Tool

This web site is dedicated to the display of color combinations, changing css styles, and displaying many powerful and unique color tools and font tools.

PALETTEMAN

Palette Man is a color palette-generation program that’s geared toward web designers. You’re allowed to select 5 colors from the 216-color web-safe palette and see how they interact.

ColorExplorer

A brand spanking new way of working with digital colors! With the colorful toolbox at ColorExplorer you can easily create, manage, and explore color palettes for use in web designs, desktop publishing, or any other graphic design process.
Go ahead! – get started on your colorful and creative voyage into the world of hues, spot colors, red, greens, yellow, and blues!

Color Palette Generator

Automatically create a color palette from any photo.

Kolur

Kolur is a simple (and hopefully) enjoyable way to browse color palettes. Designs displayed in our gallery go beyond the generic 3 colored dots, and attempt to portray the possibilities in palettes.

Color Codes Matching Chart HTML

Note that the conversions in this color codes chart are best described as “nominal”. They will produce an invertible conversion between the RGB code and a subset of CMYK; that is, one can take an RGB color code and convert to certain CMYK colors, and from these CMYK colors obtain the matching, original RGB codes.

Color Hunter

Color Hunter is a place to find and make color palettes created from images.

Color Match

Color Match is a website tool showing how to match website colors and help in choosing a website color scheme or color code. Also displays the HTML Color Code.

Gray Bit

GrayBit is an online accessibility testing tool designed to visually convert a full-color web page into a grayscale rendition for the purpose of visually testing the page’s perceived contrast.

ColourMod

ColourMod originally made its debut as a web-based DHTML Dynamic Colour Picker. Since the inception of OS X from Apple, ColourMod has been ported to the Dashboard interface and is fully functional in OS X Tiger and Leopard.

ColorZilla

Advanced Eyedropper, Color Picker, Palette Viewer and other colorful goodies for your Firefox

Color Blender

Pick a color value format, input two valid CSS color values in the format you chose, and pick the number of midpoints you’d like to see. The palette will show the colors you input as well as the requested number of midpoint colors, and the values of those colors.

Color Blender

Your free online tool for color matching and palette design!

Color Grab

ColourGrab is about er.. colours! Type a URL of any online image below and our system will tell you the most used colours from that image, and as a result give you some inspirtation! Not bad if you ask me! So without further-ado,

Web Color Visualizer

To visualize color combinations, roll over the swatches to change the color of the elements.

ColorMunki

ColorMunki is the industry’s hottest all-in-one color solution that delivers unparalleled color control and color creation tools for photo and design digital workflows.

Easy RGB

From your RGB colors it creates colors complements, harmonies and themes.
It can be used to easily generate a Web site color theme or to select good trim and accent colors for your home decorations.

4096 Color Wheel

Color Schemer Online

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Color Jack – Color Theory

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Colr

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Color Wheel Pro says:Orange combines the energy of red and the happiness of yellow. It is associated with joy, sunshine, and the tropics. Orange represents enthusiasm, fascination, happiness, creativity, determination, attraction, success, encouragement, and stimulation.

Dark orange can mean deceit and distrust.
Red-orange corresponds to desire, sexual passion, pleasure, domination, aggression, and thirst for action.
Gold evokes the feeling of prestige. The meaning of gold is illumination, wisdom, and wealth. Gold often symbolizes high quality.

Traffik

TOY

Halo

AWP

Wufoo

Colourpixel

Sprinkle Penny

Spendly Touch

Joshua Giblette

Eighty Four

Happycom

Think Orange

Four 24

Superfluous Banter

Coolar

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or to ensure you are updated with every D-Lists posts follow: @d_lists

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Design is a fluid and shifting process in which layers are constantly modified and tweaked. As complexity builds, so does the need for preserving data in a flexible way. Learning non-destructive editing techniques helps you produce documents that bend along with your creativity. Photoshop Masks are the cornerstone of this process. Not only do they preserve important pixel data, but they allow for the creation of flexible interface elements as well. In this article, we’ll explore the technical aspects and creative advantages of incorporating masks into your workflow.

Photoshop offers five methods of masking: Pixel Masks, Vector Masks, Quick Masks, Clipping Masks and Clipping Paths, all of which define pixel opacities without affecting the original data. Each of them has its own pros and cons, and knowing which method to use is extremely important for creating clean, flexible and properly masked layers.

Pixel Masks

Pixel masks determine opacity values based on a raster image with grayscale values that correspond pixel for pixel to the original layer. This makes them ideal for masking complex photographic imagery (e.g. the hair on a model or leaves on a tree). Pixel masks allow 100 shades of gray, which correspond directly to opacity percentages. The ability to vary opacities is unique to pixel masks, making them an invaluable tool.

Pixel Masks are ideal for extracting complex photographic imagery. (Image Source)

While pixel masks can be easily modified, they aren’t ideal for every situation. Because of their raster format, scaling them can cause unwanted artifacts and interpolated bluriness. Smooth curves and perfect edges can also be tricky to create when painting a mask. Under such circumstances, vector masks would be preferable.

Pixel masks should not be used when you might have to rescale.

Creation

Creating a pixel mask is as easy as selecting the layer or layer group and clicking the “Add Layer Mask” button at the bottom of the layer’s palette. A second thumbnail will be added to the layer, giving you a preview of the mask. By default, this will be entirely white. However, if you happen to have a selection active when creating the mask, the selection will be used to define the grayscale values of the mask.

Once a mask is created, it can be edited as if it were any other pixel data by clicking on the mask’s thumbnail. You can then paint in black to hide areas or white to show them. The mask can also be tweaked using adjustments and filters such as Curves, Threshold, Unsharp mask and Gaussian blur.

Painting the mask black is much like using the eraser tool. (Image Source)

View Modes

While creating a mask, there are a number of ways to view the mask data. Option + clicking on the thumbnail will display only the mask on the canvas; this is great for fine-tuning areas but doesn’t allow you to see the actual layer as you work. If you’d like to see both the mask and the layer at the same time, you can view the mask as a Ruby overlay. Simply press \ with the layer selected to toggle the overlay on and off. The color and opacity of the overlay can also be changed by double-clicking the mask’s thumbnail. Additionally, if you’d like to temporarily remove the mask, you can toggle it on and off by Shift + clicking on the mask’s thumbnail.

Turning the mask off and the overlay on can help with fine-tuning. (Image Source)

Channels

Every time a layer with a mask is selected, the mask is shown as a temporary alpha channel in the Channels palette. From here, you can save the channel for later use by dragging the channel to the “Create new channel” button at the bottom of the palette or by selecting “New Channel” from the fly-out menu. You can also change the mask’s Ruby overlay settings by double-clicking the channel’s thumbnail. Because a temporary channel becomes available whenever a masked layer is selected, you can use some keyboard shortcuts to toggle between the actual layer and its mask. Pressing Command + \ will select the mask and Command + 2 will bring you back to the layer data.

A temporary channel is available whenever a layer with a mask is selected.

Vector Masks

Vector masks pick up where pixel masks fall short. By defining the mask’s shape using paths, vector masks provide a superior level of finesse and flexibility. They’re ideal for defining shapes with clean, crisp lines, such as interface elements.

Vector Masks are ideal for masking crisp-edged objects. (Image Source)

The disadvantage of vector masks is that they are unable to vary pixel opacities; they are basically either 0 or 100. For this reason, many masking jobs require a hybrid implementation. By using a vector mask to define the solid edges and a pixel mask for the more complex areas or for varying opacities, you can effectively extract objects while maximizing flexibility.

Creation

To add a vector mask to an existing layer, simply Command + Click the “Add Layer Mask” button at the bottom of the layer’s palette. If a path is currently active, the mask will be created using it. Otherwise, the mask will be empty. Paths can then be added, subtracted or modified by clicking the mask’s thumbnail.

Being able to create flexible interface elements is one of the best advantages of vector masks. Using the Shape Tool (U) set to Shape Layers allows you to quickly create a fill layer with a Vector Mask. These layers are far more flexible than a raster level and are perfect for creating buttons, rules and other elements that can be resized without interpolating data.

The flexibility offered by Vector Masks make them perfect for interface elements such as buttons.

View Modes

By clicking on the Vector Mask’s thumbnail in the the Layer’s palette, you can show or hide the paths saved in the mask. These paths can also be accessed from the Path’s palette, but only if the layer itself is selected. Toggling the mask on and off can be done by Shift + clicking the thumbnail.

Paths

Much like how layer masks appear in the Channels palette, a temporary work path would be displayed in the Paths palette when a layer with a vector mask is selected. You can then save the mask by dragging it to the “Create new path” button at the bottom of the palette or selecting “Save Path” from the fly-out menu. This temporary path can be accessed at any time by first selecting the Path Selection tool (A) and then pressing Enter; it can be dismissed by pressing Enter again. You can also quickly create a selection from an active path by pressing Command + Enter.

Applying

Before a vector mask can be applied to a layer it must first be rasterized by right-clicking the vector mask thumbnail and choosing Rasterize Vector Mask. If the layer already has a pixel mask, the two masks will be composited together to create a single pixel mask. It can then be applied like any other layer mask (right-clicking the thumbnail and choosing “Apply Layer Mask”).

Quick Masks

The Quick Mask mode allows you to create a selection using pixel editing tools as opposed to the primitive selection tools. This is a more logical approach to creating a complex mask with variable opacity. You can access this mode by clicking on the “Quick Mask” button in the Tools bar or by pressing Q.

Once in Quick Mask mode, you’ll no longer be editing the current layer. Instead, you’ll be editing a Ruby overlay that can be edited as if it were regular pixel data. By default, entering this mode will cover the entire canvas with a semi-transparent red color. You can then paint white to remove the overlay and black to add it back. The Quick Mask is essentially a more visual representation of a selection. Therefore, every area that you remove from the overlay is added to the selection.

Quick Mask mode allows you to quickly paint a selection. (Image Source)

Options

You can modify how the Quick Mask mode is displayed by double-clicking the “Quick Mask” button in the Tools bar. Here you can change the color and opacity of the mask as well as whether the mask color indicates masked areas or selected areas. Personally, I find painting selected areas more intuitive than painting masked areas, which is the default.

The Quick Mask Options menu allows you to change the color, opacity and target of the overlay.

Saving

After creating a quick mask, you can immediately apply it to a layer by creating a layer mask or save it for later use. By selecting Selection → Save Selection, you can save your selection as a new channel or apply it to an existing channel. This allows you to come back to the selection at any time by Control + clicking the channel in the Channel’s palette or by selecting Selection → Load Selection

Saving a Quick Mask creates a new channel.

Clipping Masks

You’ll often run into situations in which multiple layers require the same mask. You could group the layers and mask the layer group, but that is not always ideal. Clipping masks allows for a layer simply to adopt the opacity of an underlying layer. This is extremely helpful when using adjustment layers; by clipping them to a layer, you can apply adjustments to a single layer without affecting those below it.

The easiest way to create a clipping mask is to Option + click between the two layers in the Layer’s palette when the clipping mask cursor appears. Alternatively, you could press Command + Option + G to clip a layer to the one below it. Any number of layers can be clipped to one master layer, but a clipped layer can’t be used as a clipping mask itself.

Clipping Masks are great for constraining Adjustment Layers. (Image Source)

Clipping Paths

Clipping Paths are a lot like Vector Masks except that they apply to an entire document rather than a layer or layer group. They are primarily used by print designers to specify uniquely shaped objects that are imported into a page layout program. The path is imported along with the image to ensure a crisp clean edge.

To create a clipping path, first be sure that you have a path saved; having a temporary Work Path does not suffice. You must select “Save Path” from the fly-out menu in the Paths palette if your path is not saved. Then, from the fly-out menu, choose “Clipping Path.” Your document’s appearance will not change, but if you were to import the document into Illustrator using the Place command, it would be clipped to the path.

Masks Palette

The Masks palette, introduced in CS4, adds some useful features to help with creating and refining both pixel and vector masks. For the first time, you can feather a mask and change its density without losing the original mask.

The Masks palette was a great addition to Photoshop CS4.

Create/View Buttons

At the top of the palette are two buttons that can be used to select the layer mask or vector mask or to create one if one doesn’t exist.

Density

The density slider basically controls how strong the mask is. At 100%, fully masked areas will be completely transparent. When density is set to 50%, those same areas would be only 50% transparent.

The Density slider controls the strength of the mask. (Image Source)

Feather

Feathering the edges of a mask used to require applying a Gaussian Blur, which would destroy the original mask shape. With the Masks palette you can now change the amount of feathering at any time while maintaining the original mask data.

With the Feather slider, you can now change the mask’s softness on the fly. (Image Source)

Mask Edge

The Mask Edge menu provides some long-desired features that aid in refining a mask’s perimeter. They come in extremely handy when the extracted object is still picking up color from the masked background.

Radius
The Radius setting is similar to feathering, but it retains some of the edge’s crispness. This can be helpful with reducing awkward or overly sharp edges on complex shapes.

Contrast
Contrast simply modifies the contrast of edge elements, which helps crispen any soft edges. Using this in conjunction with Radius can help remove unwanted artifacts in the mask.

Radius and Contrast can be used to remove unwanted artifacts. (Image Source)

Smooth
Smooth simplifies the complexity of the mask’s edges. This can be useful if you’ve painted the mask by hand and need to quickly clean up some rough edges.

Feather
This feather command is nearly identical to the Mask palette’s primary feather command, but it restricts the blur more to the edge of the mask. The difference is slight yet noticeable.

Contract/Expand
The Contract and Expand slider allows you to grow and shrink the edges of the mask. This is extremely useful for reducing unwanted color fringes.

Smooth and Contract helps tighten up masks to reduce color fringes. (Image Source)

Preview Mode
At the bottom of the palette are five different preview modes that allow you to view the mask as a (1) selection with marching ants, (2) quick mask ruby overlay, (3) black matte, (4) white matte or (5) grayscale mask.

Check the mask in different views to ensure its quality. (Image Source)

Color Range

The Color Range menu is one of the most powerful ways to extract an image from an evenly colored background. With only a few clicks and adjustments, even the most complex object can be cleanly masked. For further details, see the “Techniques” section just below.

Techniques

Each masking job is unique and requires a different method of creation and refinement. However, some common techniques can drastically improve the efficiency and maximize the flexibility of your masks.

Color Range

When your masking task requires an object to be extracted from an evenly colored background (much like the video editing process of Chroma keying), the quickest means is often the Color Range command. First, use the Eyedropper Tool to select the primary color of the background. Then, you can use the “Add to sample” and “Remove from sample” tools to refine the color selection. The fuzziness slider lets you broaden the range of colors selected. If the color data is there to support it, this process makes short work of an otherwise tedious task.

The Eyedropper tools allow you to easily select the sky in the photo.

Color Range can make quick work of complex masks. (Image Source)

Channels

A mask is often hiding in one of the layer’s channels, just waiting to be unlocked. Depending on the image you’re using, you may be able to find a channel with strong contrast between the target object and its surroundings. You may even want to try temporarily changing the color mode to Lab or CMYK to provide alternative channel options. Once you find a channel with a strong enough contrast, Command + click it to create a selection. Then, apply the selection as a layer mask. You’ll then be able to tweak it as you would any other mask.

As the image below demonstrates, simply selecting a channel is not always sufficient for a clean mask. You may need to do some mixing with other channels.

(Image Source)

1. The original image has strong vibrant colors, making it a great opportunity to create a mask using channels.
2. The red channel has the foreground-to-background contrast, so we’ll start there. We’ve copied and pasted it onto a new layer and then inverted it.
3. The green cup is still very prominent, so we’ve converted the blue channel to a layer and will use it to negate the green and red cups.
4. By setting the Blending Mode on the blue channel’s layer to Multiply, we can effectively erase any extraneous white areas.
5. The two layers are then flattened and applied as a layer mask to the original image. This leaves us with a cleanly masked blue mug.

Pixel/Vector Hybrid

Objects will quite often have a combination of sharp edges and soft feathered edges. In instances like these, using both a pixel and a vector mask may be best. One common example of this is extracting a figure. You can use the pen tool to draw all of the smooth edges along the figure’s body and then use a pixel mask to paint in the fine details such as hair.

Multiple Masks

There may be times when you want to apply more than one mask to a layer. You could choose to apply the mask by right-clicking the layer and selecting Apply Layer Mask, after which you could apply a new mask. This, however, is not ideal because the data behind the mask will be lost.

A far better method is to create a Smart Object from the layer and mask the new layer. This allows you to apply two masks to one layer without losing data. In fact, if needed, you could repeat this process over and over.

Converting a layer to a Smart Object allows you to add multiple masks without losing data.

Layer Styles

If you have ever added a mask to a layer with layer styles, things may have gotten messy, especially if the mask had soft edges or varying opacities. This is because, by default, Photoshop uses a composite of the layer’s opacity along with any masks on it to define the area used by the layer styles. This is desirable but can also be a nuisance. To counter the default behavior, open the Blending Options menu for the layer, and apply either “Layer Mask Hides Effects” or “Vector Mask Hides Effects.”

Messes can often be tidied by using the “Layer Mask Hides Effects” option.

Blend Clipped Layers as Group

By default, Photoshop assumes that all layers in a clipping stack should be blended with the base layer before the base layer is blended with the layers below it. This makes sense sometimes, but other times you may need the clipped layers to adopt the shape of the base layer but not the blend mode. To prevent this behavior, open the Blending Options menu for the base layer (right-click the layer and choose “Blending Options”), and uncheck the “Blend Clipped Layers as Group” option. Now, each of the clipped layers will blend with underlying layers as if they weren’t clipped.

The “Blend Clipped Layers as Group” causes all clipped layers to blend together first and then blend with underlying layers using the base layer’s Blend Mode.

Type Masks

Grouped with the Type tool in the Tools bar is the deceptively named Type Mask tool. It allows you to create type just like the regular type tool; but once committed, the type is converted to a selection. This selection can be converted to a layer mask but will no longer be editable. This is not ideal. If editability is important, you may want to create a regular type layer and use it as the base of a clipping mask. This is the only way to mask objects to the shape of type without losing the ability to edit the text. Perhaps someday Photoshop will let us create an editable Type Mask for a layer.

Removing Edge Fringes

Even after using the “Refine Edge” command in the Masks palette, you may find random color fringes left along the edge of your mask. This is where some manual brushwork comes in handy. The Paintbrush tool can be used here, but I recommend the Healing Brush, Stamp Tool or Smudge Tool because they will blend better with the subject.

First, create a new layer and clip it to the masked layer. Then, set your tool of choice to sample all layers. You can now select your sample area and paint the fringes out; the original layer data will be preserved. Often, changing the brush’s Blend Mode will help preserve the detail of the layer.

Color Fringes can usually be smudged or painted away on a clipped layer. (Image Source)

Keyboard Shortcuts

• \
  View Layer Mask as an overlay
• Command + \
  Set layer focus to Layer Mask
• Command + 2
  Set layer focus to layer data
• Command + Option + \
  Create selection from Layer Mask
• Command + Option + G
  Make/Release Clipping Mask
• A, then Enter
  Activate/Dismiss Vector Mask
• Command + Enter
  Create selection from active vector mask
• Command + Click Mask Thumbnail
  Create selection from mask
• Command + Option + Click Mask Thumbnail
  Subtract mask from selection
• Command + Option + Shift + Click Mask Thumbnail
  Intersect mask from selection
• Q
  Toggle Quick Mask mode

Inside the Color Range Menu

• Option
  Toggle the Reset button and the “Subtract from Sample” tool
• Command
  Toggle between the Selection view and Image view
• Shift
  Toggle the “Add to Sample” tool

Further Reading

• Nesting Smart Objects for Multi-Mask Effects in Photoshop
• Using Masks to Improve Landscape Images
• Photoshop Masking and Compositing
• Masking a Tree
• Seamless Compositing
• Fluid Mask, by Vertus
• Selecting and Extracting Hair
• Mastering Photoshop With Paths

(al)

© Thomas Giannattasio for Smashing Magazine, 2009. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: masks, photoshop

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Colour Wheel Pro says: Yellow is the color of sunshine. It’s associated with joy, happiness, intellect, and energy.

Dull (dingy) yellow represents caution, decay, sickness, and jealousy.
Light yellow is associated with intellect, freshness, and joy.

Creative Spark

I Am Always Hungry

Espira

Chunk

Loaf Creative

Imaginary Design

Single Fire

Bard Hole Standal

Lemon Festival

EBSL

Joomla Mini

Mail Mops

Riot Industries

Typography Served

Puppet Brain

Ryan Keiser

If you like this post you may also want to look at:

Green Website Showcase

Red Website Showcase

Why not follow me on twitter: @atikusdesign
or to ensure you are updated with every D-Lists posts follow: @d_lists

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Click on the images for larger versions and more info about each photo.

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Whatever profession you’re in, there’ll come a time when you’ll need your own business card. This graphic design tutorial will show you a way to create a standard two-sided business card design in Adobe Photoshop that you can take to your printer.

Final Result

Click image to enlarge.

Set up the Photoshop canvas

1 Open a new Photoshop document that is 3.75 x 2.25 inches. Make the resolution 300 pixels per inch and set the color mode to 8-bit CMYK. A typical business card is 3.5 x 2 inches; however, to optimize the card for printing, there needs to be a quarter of an inch space along each edge called a bleed. Whatever is located in this area will not be shown in the final print.

Apply a radial gradient overlay

2 Fill the canvas with a radial gradient overlay. To add a gradient overlay layer style, double-click on the Background layer, make it editable and then double-click on it again to open the Layer Styles dialog box. Check the box beside Gradient Overlay, and in the Styles option dropdown, select Radial. Use white for the lighter, innermost color, and #c6c5c5 for the darker, gray color.

Creating the red warped rectangle shape

3 With the Rectangle Tool (U) from the Toolbox, draw a long, thick rectangle on the canvas like shown in the following figure. The color doesn’t matter since we will be applying a layer style to it.

4 With the rectangle shape layer selected in the Layers Panel, push Ctrl + T to enter Free Transform Path mode (alternatively, go to Edit > Free Transform Path) and right-click inside the transform box that appears. Choose Warp from the contextual menu, and from the Warp Options bar, choose Rise as Wrap type dropdown menu. Warp the rectangle shape using the transform controls until you have something similar to this.

5 Apply a linear gradient layer style to the warped shape. Use #841618 for the darker color in the gradient and #e82d33 for the lighter color. Once that’s done, use the Move Tool (V) to move the shape near the bottom of the canvas.

6 Duplicate the rectangle shape by pushing Ctrl + J on your keyboard. Then drag the duplicated layer below the original layer to move it behind. On this new duplicated shape layer, apply a linear gradient overlay layer style to the new shape. Use black (#000000) for the darkest color and #2b2b2b for the lighter color. Use the Move Tool (V) on this duplicated warp layer to move it so that only some parts of the top is showing.

Creating the person’s name

7 Use the Horizontal Type Tool (T) and type "John" and "Smith" (or your own first and last name) in black on two different layers near the upper left corner of the canvas. Use 25 pt, bold, Myriad Pro for "John" and 25 pt, Myriad Pro Condensed for "Smith". This font family comes with newer versions of the Windows operating system, but if you do not have this font, use something clean and professional (a sans serif font family will do the trick).

8 Apply a gradient overlay and stroke layer style to "John" text layer. On the gradient overlay, use #df1f26 for the lighter red color and #811517 for the darker color.

9 Also apply a Stroke layer style on both the "John" and "Smith" text layers. The stroke size is 1px and its position should be Outside. For the Fill Type stroke setting, choose Gradient from the dropdown menu. The gradient used for the stroke can be found in the Metals gradient preset, to access it, click on the rightward pointing arrow in the Presets box inside the Gradient Editor dialog box, this will show a contextual menu where you should be able to find Metals. Replace the dark gray color stops with the color #838484. For the "Smith" layer, just apply the same stroke settings, but don’t apply the gradient overlay.

Creating a text dropshadow

10 Select both name text layers in your Layers Panel (hold down Shift and click on each on of them) and duplicate the selected layers by right-clicking, and choosing Duplicate Layers from the contextual menu that appears.

11 Right-click on these new duplicated layers and choose Rasterize Type from the contextual menu that appears. Right-click once again and choose Merge Layers to combine them into just one layer. Push Ctrl + T to enter Free Transform mode and shrink this layer vertically using the transform controls until you have something similar to shown. This will become the text shadow.

12 Double-click on the text shadow layer to enter the Layer Styles dialog box. Apply a black (#000000) color overlay to the text shadow layer and move it behind the original name layers.

13 Apply Gaussian Blur by going to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Set the blur Radius to 4px. Then, set the layer’s opacity in the Layers Panel to 30%.

You should have something similar to this:

Creating the text reflection

14 Duplicate the original name layers again. Rasterize and merge the duplicated layers like before (see Step 11). Push Ctrl + T to enter Free Transform mode, right-click inside the transform box that appears, and choose Flip Vertical from the contextual menu. Move this layer just a few pixels underneath the original text on the canvas using the Move Tool (V) and your arrow keys. Select this layer in the Layers Panel, and then drag it behind the original name layers and shadow layer. This will become the text reflection.

15 Get the Gradient Tool (G) from the Tools Panel. In the Gradient Tool Options bar, choose the gradient preset called Foreground to Transparent and select Linear as the Style setting. Set your foreground color to black (you can do this by simply pressing D on your keyboard to reset the foreground and background color to the default). Make sure the reflection layer is the active layer in the Layers Panel, and then press Q on your keyboard to enter Quick Mask mode. Drag the gradient from the top of the reflection layer to the bottom, then press Q once again to exit Quick mask mode. A selection will appear. Press the Delete key five times on your keyboard, then Ctrl + D to end the selection.

16 Change the reflection layer’s opacity to 20% to finish off the text reflection.

Entering the rest of the business card information

17 In black (#000000), bold Myriad Pro, type "marketing expert" (or your own job title) under the name on your canvas using the Horizontal Type Tool (T).

18 Off to the right of the name, type some of the things you specialize in (see example in the figure below) using black, 9pt, bold, Myriad Pro Condensed Italic. Each line should be a distinct text layer.

19 Type the contact information below the previous layers. Use Myriad Pro bold for the beginning word and Myriad Pro Condensed Italic for the following words.

20 With the Line Tool from the Toolbox, draw a small 2px vertical line on your canvas to the left of the information that was just typed.

The back of the card

21 To make the back of the card, first turn the visibility off in all the text layers, leaving only the business card background. Select the entire canvas by pressing Ctrl + A (or Select > All). Choose Edit > Copy Merged (Shift + Ctrl + C).

22 Now, Create a new document (Ctrl + N) with the same settings as the front of the card. Paste the copied selection into the new document. Go to Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal to flip it so that it’s oriented a different way as the back of the business card.

23 Add your company name and website using the text effect techniques we’ve discussed above. You can use Steps 7 – 16 for the company name.

Share your own work on Flickr

If you followed along the tutorial, we’d like to see what you ended up with. Please include it in the Six Revisions community group pool on Flickr.

Your thoughts? Need help?

What did you think about this tutorial? How was the difficultly level? Did you get stuck on any part? Please let us know in the comments.

Download Source Files

• slick-business-card-typography (0.86MB, ZIP)

Related Content

• 15 Excellent Logo Design Tutorials Using Illustrator
• 70 Excellent Logo Design Tutorials and Resources
• 10 Wonderful Letterpress Type Tutorials
• Related categories: Tutorials and Graphic Design

About the Author

Dave Martinez is an internet entrepreneur living in Dallas, Texas.  He is the current owner of Card Observer, a blog exclusively for business card design. Submit your own business card through his site and show it off. Also, you can connect with Dave by following him on Twitter.

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Why? According to a report by the Danish Center for Accessibility, as many as 25% of the world’s Internet users have some sort of visual, auditory or mobility disability.

Fail to take into the consideration the needs of these people and you are depriving your client the opportunity to connect with a huge audience. Not only doesn’t that make good business sense, but also you could end up breaking the law. For example, if you’re working for an organization that is hoping to do business with the U.S. government, you’re going to run up against the “508 Act”.

This regulation requires all Federal agencies that “develop, procure, maintain, or use electronic and information technology”, to provide access to disabled users that is comparable to access available to everyone else.

How To Meet Accessibility Requirements

In order to provide for the access needs of the disabled, it’s important to understand the technology challenges these users face everyday.

• Use of non-standard browsers, earlier versions of mainstream browsers, or specially designed text-to-speech and text-to-brail readers that do not function in the way we normally understand browsers to function.
• Lower screen resolutions, the need for larger fonts, and reduced screen size.
• Colorblind users who cannot easily “Click the red button to cancel your order.”
• Users with motor impairment may use non-standard pointing devices and keywords.

Fortunately, The Guesswork Has Been Eliminated

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) maintains accessibility standards and best practices on their All Standards and Drafts page; of particular interest are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.

That is the document that provides accessibility recommendations and guidelines designed to accommodate people with a wide range of disabilities.

You Can Take Advantage Of Web Accessibility Design Tools

Recognizing the need to provide support for the world’s disabled Internet users, a number of companies have developed free and low cost tools to help designers comply with accessibility guidelines. Here are a few of the available tools that will turn you into an accessibility expert.

WAVE

For those of you that hate reading reports, and believe a picture really is worth 1,000 words, WAVE is an excellent tool for you. Rather than produce reports, WAVE displays the actual web page with embedded icons and other visual indicators that point out where potential accessible issues exist.

WAVE provides an amazing number of ways you can use this tool. In addition to actually embedding WAVE validation code into your designs, you can use any of these options:

• Enter the URL of the page to be checked into a form on WAVE’s site.
• Copy and paste the code to be checked into a form on WAVE’s site.
• Install the Firefox Toolbar.

Color Oracle

Color Oracle is a colorblindness simulator for Window, Mac and Linux. It takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness by showing you in real time what people with common color vision impairments will see.

Image Analyser

This service examines all images found on a web page to check for any accessibility issues. Simply enter the URL of any website, and it does the rest. The width, height, alt, and longdesc attributes are examined for appropriate values.

Colour Blindness Simulator

Colour Blindness Simulator is a web based tool that reveals how your images may appear to users with a variety of color blindness conditions.

Readability Testing

This online tool will perform tests on your text to determine it’s level of readability. Your text will be penalized for polysyllabic words and long, complex sentences. Your writing will score better when you use simpler diction and write short sentences.

Don’t Overlook Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools

In addition to the accessibility design tools, there area number of free and low-cost accessibility evaluation tools that perform in-depth evaluations of Web pages and generate extensive reports pertaining to accessibility issues.

Some of the tools are highly specialized and focus on specific disabilities, such as blindness, while others provide information on accessibility issues in general.

The W3C maintains a complete list of most commonly used accessibility evaluation tools.

Is Accessibility Design In Your Future?

It should be, if it isn’t already. In addition to the UK’s legal requirements, many other countries and local governments are becoming more involved in ensuring equal Internet access to everyone regardless of physical disabilities. The W3C maintains a regularly updated list of new legal requirements worldwide.

In addition to simply staying legal, discussing accessibility with your clients could be a great way to set you apart from your competitors who may not be as knowledgeable about the subject as you now are.

Here’s How To Really Understand How Important Your Job Is

If you really want to see firsthand how much a difference you can make in the lives of disabled people by designing Web sites that are accessible, spend a few hours sitting next to a blind or physically challenged user.

Once you witness for yourself how difficult the Internet can be when designers ignore 25% of the Internet user population, you’ll keep accessibility top-of-mind whenever you sit down to design.

About the Author

Sandy Butler is a research analyst at Accredited Supplier, where she researches website design companies and their practices and trends. Sandy’s research has been featured on top websites including TechCrunch, Brand Republic and SitePoint.

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In this web design and development tutorial, you’ll get a walkthrough for creating a "Call to Action" button sprite in Photoshop as well as how to use jQuery to animate it. This tutorial is broken up into three sections: Photoshop, HTML/CSS, and JavaScript.

Introduction

This tutorial is divided into three sections:

• Section 1: Photoshop
• Section 2: HTML/CSS
• Section 3: JavaScript (jQuery)

If you enjoyed the tutorial, please express your appreciation by including images/screen shots of your work in the Six Revisions Flickr group – we’re trying to build up the collection there so that we can all have a nice community showcase.

Final Result

Click to see live demo.

Demos

• Demo 1: Fancy
• Demo 2: Simple, HTML/CSS (non-animated)
• Demo 3: Simple, jQuery (animated)

Section 1: Photoshop

The first section will deal with the graphic creation of the Call to Action button.

Set up the Photoshop document

1 Our button’s dimensions will be 200px x 50px, but since we’ll be creating a CSS background sprite for the two different states, we’ll make the height of the canvas 100px. To begin, create a new Photoshop document (Ctrl + N) that has a canvas width of 200px and a canvas height of 100px.

2 To make drawing the button easier, we’ll set up some guides. If it isn’t turned on yet, turn on your rulers first (Ctrl + R to toggle it on and off) by going to View > Rulers and making sure that it’s checked. To create a guide, simply click on a ruler on the edge of the Photoshop workspace and drag towards your canvas. We’ll make 5 guides: 4 at the edges of the canvas, and 1 horizontal guide at the 50px mark (which effectively divides our canvas into two equal parts).

Creating the button shape

3 Now we’ll create a rounded rectangle shape. Get the Rounded Rectangle Tool from the Tools Panel. Adjust the Radius option in the Options bar to 8px. The foreground color doesn’t matter because it will be overridden by the layer styles that we’ll soon apply.

4 With the Rounded Rectangle Tool ready to go, created the rounded rectangle shape at the top half of the canvas by dragging from the top left corner to the bottom right corner of the 50px mark.

Adding layer styles to the button

5 We’ll now add a series of layer styles to the rounded rectangle shape that we just created. To start, double-click on the shape layer in the Layers Panel to open the Layer Styles dialog box.

6 First we’ll add a gradient overlay. Click on the Gradient Overlay to apply the layer style. Then click on the Gradient option to open the Gradient Editor dialog box to choose the colors we want.

7 In the Gradient Editor, change the left color stop’s color by clicking on it (this will be the color at the bottom of the button). I’ve decided to use a dark olive green color for the left color stop (#85928a). Change the right color stop to a lighter green color (#d3e1d8) – this will be the color of the button at the top. Then slide the Color Midpoint to 40% so that the light green is slightly more dominant.

8 Add an Inner Glow layer style next, this will give the button a subtle white border. Set the Opacity option to 100% and change the color of the glow to white (#ffffff) by clicking on the small box to open the color picker and then changing it there. Then under the Elements option set, change the Size option to 3px.

9 The final layer style we’ll add to the normal state button is a 1px dark green (#74857a) stroke to add a narrow border around the shape. Set the Size option to 1px. Set the Position option to Inner so that it draws the border inside the button shape. Finally, change the color of the stroke by clicking on the Color option to open the Color Picker dialog box and entering a dark green color (#74857a).

Typing in the text

10 For the text of our button, we’ll use a simple and familiar font family: Arial. You can use any font that you wish, but typically, the text effect we’ll be applying is best suited for bold and sans serif fonts – keep that in mind when selecting the font family. Grab the Horizontal Type Tool (T) from the Tools Panel. In the Options bar, set the font family to Arial, the font style to Bold, font size to 24px, and anti-aliasing method to Sharp. Don’t worry about the font color since it will be overridden by the layer styles we’ll be applying later.

11 Click anywhere in the canvas to start typing, and type your call to action; the call to action used here is "Sign Up" but yours might be "Buy Now" or "See Demo", it’s up to you.

Centering the text

12 Depending on where you started typing, your text may not be centered in the button, so we need to center it precisely. First, create a marquee selection around the button by Ctrl + clicking on the button shape layer’s thumbnail in the Layers Panel; this will automatically create a marquee selection around the edge of the button.

13 Now click on the text layer in the Layers Panel to make it the active layer (don’t deselect the selection yet). Then go to Layer > Align Layers to Selection > Vertically Center to position the text layer vertically centered on our button.

14 With the marquee selection still around the button and the text layer still the active layer in the Layers Panel, go to Layer > Align Layers to Selection > Horizontally Center to locate the text in the middle of the button.

Applying Layer Styles to the text

15 Double-click on the text layer to open up the Layer Styles dialog box. We’re going to create an inset text effect similar to the How to Create Inset Typography in Photoshop tutorial I wrote a while back.

16 Apply a gradient overlay by checking the checkbox beside it. click on the Gradient option to open the Gradient Editor. For the left color stop, choose a dark olive green color (#425047). For the right color stop, choose a slightly lighter green color (#94ad9d).

17 Next, apply an inner shadow layer style. Set the Angle option to 90 degrees, Distance to 1px, and Size to 2px. Keep the inner shadow color to black (#000000) and the Opacity option to 75%. This will create a subtle inset/stamped-in effect.

18 To finish off the text layer styles for the normal state, we’ll add a subtle drop shadow at the bottom of the text. Change the Blend Mode option to Normal and the color of the shadow to a light green color (#d1dfd7). Set the Opacity to 100%. Make sure that the Angle option is also at 90 degrees to keep it the same as the inner shadow’s light source. Finally, set the Distance option to 1px and the Size option to 2px (equal to the inner shadow’s settings).

Creating the hover state button group

19 The hover state will fill up the bottom of our canvas. We’ll just duplicate the normal state button, move it down the lower part of the canvas, and tweak the layer styles to make a slightly different look. To keep things organized, we’ll group together the normal state button layers. To create a group, click on the Create a new group icon at the bottom of the Layers Panel (it looks like a folder).

20 Change the group’s name to something more intuitive than the default Group 1, such as Normal. Then drag the two normal state layers in the newly created group.

21 If you’ve turned off the guides that we created earlier, turn it back on to help us position the hover state button accurately; the shortcut is holding down Ctrl (or Cmd) and then pressing ; (alternatively, go to View > Show > Guides).

22 Duplicate the Normal group by choosing the group in the layers panel. Name the group to something that makes sense like Hover.

23 With the Hover group active in the Layers Panel, click on the Move Tool (V) in the Tools Panel and use your down arrow key to move the Hover group to the bottom of the canvas so that the top edge of the button is right on the middle guide. Use the Zoom Tool (Z) in the Tools Panel to help you position the Hover group if you’re having a hard time seeing the edges. If you use the Zoom Tool (Z), just press Ctrl/Cmd + 1 to go back to 100% view.

Changing the layer styles of the Hover group

24 Since we just need to tweak a few settings, creating the hover group button will be quicker. Inside the Hover group, double-click on the button shape layer in the Layers Panel to open the Layer Styles dialog box. We will keep everything the same except the gradient overlay layer style colors. Edit the settings so that the left color stop of the gradient is a dark green color (#515753) and the right color stop is a slightly lighter green color (but still dark – #7d837f).

25 Next, double-click on the text layer in the Hover group to open up its Layer Styles dialog box. Change the Drop shadow color to a darker color (#7a807c).

26 Finally, edit the gradient overlay layer style colors. Set the left color stop to a dark green color (#5d615e) and the right color stop to a slightly lighter green, but still dark, color (#606462).

Section 1: Photoshop done

We’re now done with the Photoshop portion of this tutorial (Section 1). If you followed along, you should now have something like this:

This will be our CSS background sprite. Don’t close the Photoshop document yet, since we still have to save it for the web in Section 2.

Section 2: HTML/CSS

Now, we’ll make our Call to Action button functional using HTML/CSS.

1 Start by creating a folder that’s designated as our working directory. I called this directory "Call to Action Button" but feel free to name it something else. We’ll save all of our assets in this folder.

2 FWe’ll save our CSS background sprite (the button we created in Section 1). Go back to Photoshop, choose File > Save for Web & Devices. Save it in JPG file format (PNG or GIF works too) inside the Call to Action Button folder as call_to_action_sprite.jpg.

3 Next, we’ll create the HTML document – the best way to do this is with your favorite source code editor (I use Dreamweaver), but a simple text editor will suffice. Create a standard HTML document, and save it inside the Call to Action Button folder as index.html.

4 For the HTML, we’ll use a hyperlink element <a> nested inside a paragraph element (<p>) with a class of cta-button. Here is the code to place inside the <body> of index.html. For web accessibility, we type out the text in our call to action button, which is "Sign Up".

Code block 1:

<body>
  <p class="cta-button"><a href="#">Sign Up</a></p>
</body>

View of p.cta-button a element in Google Chrome.

5 Now we need to style it, so create a stylesheet called styles.css and save it in the Call to Action Button folder.

6 In index.html, link to your stylesheet.

Code block 2:

<head>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css" type="text/css" media="screen"  />
</head>

7 We need to display the p.cta-button element as a block element so that we can give it a set height and width equal to our call to action button (width:200px, height:50px). We also set it so that its background is the bottom part of our CSS sprite (the hover state). Later on, we’ll reveal it by moving the background of the <a> element by styling the a:hover pseudo-selector. To center the button on the browser viewport, we use the margin:0 auto technique, which works for most browsers including IE5.5 and above.

Code block 3:

.cta-button {
  display:block;
  width:200px;
  height:50px;
  background:url(call_to_action_sprite.jpg) no-repeat 0 -50px;
  margin:0 auto;
}

View of Call to Action button with background sprite set.

8 Next we’ll style the <a> element inside the p.cta-button paragraph. We also need it to be a block element so that we can use the text-indent CSS background image replacement technique to move the HTML text ("Sign Up") outside of the browser’s viewport; we do this by setting an extreme value of -9999px to its text-indent attribute. With set the width and height to 100% so that it’s equal to the width and height of p.cta-button. Finally, we position the background sprite to the top left of the image sprite, which is the normal state.

Code block 4:

.cta-button a {
  display:block;
  width:100%;
  height:100%;
  background:url(call_to_action_sprite.jpg) no-repeat 0 0;
  text-indent:-9999px;
}

View of Call to Action button with CSS finalized. Sign Up HTML text is indented out of the viewport.

9 At this point, we want to reveal the hover state when the user mouses over the button, so we’ll use the :hover psuedo-selector to hide the background.

Code block 5:

.cta-button a:hover {
  background-position:0 50px;
}

Section 2: HTML/CSS finished

All together, here’s our HTML and CSS.

Code block 6:

<body>
  <p class="cta-button"><a href="#">Sign Up</a></p>
</body>

Code block 7:

.cta-button {
  display:block;
  width:200px;
  height:50px;
  background:url(call_to_action_sprite.jpg) no-repeat 0 -50px;
  margin:0 auto;
}
.cta-button a {
  display:block;
  width:100%;
  height:100%;
  background:url(call_to_action_sprite.jpg) no-repeat 0 0;
  text-indent:-9999px;
}
.cta-button a:hover {
  background-position:0 50px;
}

Demo of HTML/CSS

Example 1: Call to Action button with HTML/CSS.

Section 3: JavaScript/jQuery

Let’s animate our button, shall we?

1 First, download the jQuery library and save it in the Call to Action button folder. If you’re interested in studying the library, download the uncompressed version, but if you’re going into production, download the minified (smaller file size) version.

2 In the <head> of index.html, right below the link reference to styles.css, reference the jQuery JavaScript library.

Code block 8:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
  <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.3.2.min.js"></script>
</head>

3 Create a blank JavaScript file and save it as cta-javascript.js inside the Call to Action button folder.

4 Reference cta-javascript.js in index.html, right below the jquery library reference.

Code block 9:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
  <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.3.2.min.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="cta-javascript.js"></script>
</head>

5 Switch over to cta-javascript.js, then we’ll start coding. First, let’s set up the .ready() method which is a jQuery method that allows us to run our code as soon as the DOM is ready to be worked on.

Code block 10:

$(document).ready(function(){
  ...our code goes in here...
});

6 The first thing we need to do is to remove the :hover style because it will affect the animation effect. Doing it this way (via JavaScript) ensures that our button degrades nicely – even with JavaScript disabled, there will still be a hover effect. We can use the .css() method to remove the style.

Code block 11:

$('p.cta-button a')
  .css({
    'backgroundPosition':'0 0'
})

7 Next, we chain the .hover() method, which is an event helper that deals with the mouseover event to the $() element selection. The hover method can take in two functions: the first function executes code for the mouseover event, and the second function executes code for the mouseout event (when the user removes the mouse pointer out of the element).

Code block 12:

$('p.cta-button a')
  .css({
    'backgroundPosition': '0 0'
  })
  .hover(
    function(){
      ...code to execute on mouseover...
    },
    function(){
      ...code to execute on mouseout...
    }
)

8 The code we want to execute on mouseover and mouseout is the .animate() method, which smoothly transitions CSS properties from the current value to the desired value. In this case, we want to transition the opacity to 0 when on mouseover (to reveal the hover state), and 1 when the mouse leaves the  p.cta-button a element. The .animate() method also takes an integer as a parameter that dictates how fast the effect transisition should occur, in millisecond units. I found that 650ms was a good speed, but feel free to experiment here. And on a final note, we use the stop() JavaScript method on the element we’re transitioning so that if the user mouses in and out quickly before a transition is finished, it stops it before executing the new animation event.

Code block 13:

.hover(
  function(){
    $(this)
      .stop()
      .animate({
        'opacity': 0
 	  }, 650);
  },
  function(){
  $(this)
    .stop()
    .animate({
      'opacity': 1
 	}, 650);
  }
);

Section 3: JavaScript (jQuery) done!

We’re now done with the entire tutorial. Here’s the JavaScript in one go:

Code block 14:

$(document).ready(function(){
  $('p.cta-button a')
    .css({  'backgroundPosition': '0 0' })
    .hover(
      function(){
        $(this)
          .stop()
          .animate({
            'opacity': 0
          }, 650);
      },
      function(){
        $(this)
          .stop()
          .animate({
            'opacity': 1
          }, 650);
      }
    );
});

JavaScript demo

Example 2: Call to Action button with jQuery animation.

Download the source files

• animated-call-to-action (ZIP, 0.57MB)

Questions or comments?

Were you able to complete the tutorial? How was the difficultly? Did you get stuck in any way? Please pose your questions and provide us with your feedback on how we can make tutorials on Six Revisions better.

Related Content

• How to Create a Slick and Clean Button in Photoshop
• 10 JavaScript Effects to Boost Your Website’s Fanciness Factor
• Create a Web Layout with 3D Elements using Photoshop
• Related categories: Tutorials and User Interface

About the Author

Jacob Gube is the Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisions. He’s also a web developer/designer who specializes in front-end development (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) and PHP development. If you’d like to connect with him, head on over to the contact page and follow him on Twitter: @sixrevisions.

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This is why there are certain techniques that help designers group content and show it only if the user is interested in what you have to offer and interacts with the page.

Today we are making a simple, yet eye-catching accordion with the help of CSS, jQuery and the easing plug-in for some fancy effects.

You can go ahead and download the demo files before we continue with step one.

Step 1 – XHTML

As you can see from the demo, the accordion is divided into four sections, each defined by a LI element with a class name of menu. They are positioned inside the main unordered list (ul.container) and share a common XHTML structure:

demo.html

<li class="menu"> <!-- This LI is positioned inside the main UL -->

<ul> <!-- This UL holds the section title and content  -->

<!-- The click-able section title with a unique background: -->
<li class="button"><a href="#" class="green">Kiwis <span></span></a></li>

<!-- The dropdown list, hidden by default and shown on title click: -->
<li class="dropdown">

<ul> <!-- This list holds the options that are slid down by jQuery -->

<!-- Each option is in its own LI -->
<li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwifruit">Read on Wikipedia</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&amp;q=kiwi&amp;m=text">Flickr Stream</a></li>

</ul> <!-- Closing the elements -->

</li>
</ul>

</li>

Each menu LI contains another UL, which forms a title area (li.button), and a content area (li.dropdown).

We then have an anchor element positioned inside  li.button (button being the assigned class name) . This hyperlink is later bound to a jQuery event handler, which slides open the section’s drop down list once the link is clicked.

It is also worth noting that the dropdown list elements are hidden by default with the display:none CSS property as you will see in a moment.

The accordion explained

Step 2 – CSS

If styled properly, even the simplest idea can make a big difference in the overall feeling your site gives to the visitors.

It is important to take extra care so that the CSS code you produce is valid and that it works well across different browsers. I’ve included all the styles used in the demo below:

demo.css – part 1

body{
	/* Setting default text color, background and a font stack */
	color:#cccccc;
	font-size:13px;
	background: #302b23;
	font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}

ul{
	margin:0;
	padding:0;
}

ul.container{
	/* The main UL */
	width:240px;
	margin:0 auto;
	padding:50px;
}

li{
	list-style:none;
	text-align:left;
}

li.menu{
	/* The main list elements */
	padding:5px 0;
	width:100%;
}

li.button a{
	/* The section titles */
	display:block;
	font-family:BPreplay,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
	font-size:21px;
	height:34px;
	overflow:hidden;
	padding:10px 20px 0;
	position:relative;
	width:200px;
}

Here we style the main UL – ul.container, which holds the rest of the elements. Lastly, we define the looks of the hyperlinks that act as section titles (notice that the actual background images are not yet assigned).

demo.css – part 2

li.button a:hover{
	/* Removing the inherited underline from the titles */
	text-decoration:none;
}

li.button a span{
	/* This span acts as the right part of the section's background */
	height:44px;
	position:absolute;
	right:0;
	top:0;
	width:4px;
	display:block;
}

/* Setting up different styles for each section color */

li.button a.blue{background:url(img/blue.png) repeat-x top left; color:#074384;}
li.button a.blue span{ background:url(img/blue.png) repeat-x top right;}

li.button a.green{background:url(img/green.png) repeat-x top left; color:#436800;}
li.button a.green span{ background:url(img/green.png) repeat-x top right;}

li.button a.orange{background:url(img/orange.png) repeat-x top left; color:#882e02;}
li.button a.orange span{ background:url(img/orange.png) repeat-x top right;}

li.button a.red{background:url(img/red.png) repeat-x top left; color:#641603;}
li.button a.red span{ background:url(img/red.png) repeat-x top right;}

/* The hover effects */

li.button a:hover{ background-position:bottom left;}
li.button a:hover span{ background-position:bottom right;}

.dropdown{
	/* The expandable lists */
	display:none;
	padding-top:5px;
	width:100%;
}

.dropdown li{
	/* Each element in the expandable list */
	background-color:#373128;
	border:1px solid #40392C;
	color:#CCCCCC;
	margin:5px 0;
	padding:4px 18px;
}

The most interesting part here is how we specify the individual background property for every section color. We also provide a background for the span element, which holds the right part of the background image, as explained in the illustration below.

The buttons

Step 3 – jQuery

After we’ve laid the layout of the accordion, it is time to make it tick. First we need to include a few scripts in the page (this code is put inside the head section of the document):

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.easing.1.3.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="script.js"></script>

We first include the jQuery library from Google’s CDN, which will help us write compact and compatible code. Later we include the easing plugin and lastly our own script file, which I’ve covered in detail below.

As you may have noticed from the demo, the slide down effect is not your regular linear movement, but more bounce-like and lively. This is achieved with the help of the easing plug-in for jQuery. It provides a number of interesting effects which can put those lovely details in your web design.

Now lets continue with our own scripts file.

script.js

$(document).ready(function(){
	/* This code is executed after the DOM has been completely loaded */

	/* Changing thedefault easing effect - will affect the slideUp/slideDown methods: */
	$.easing.def = "easeOutBounce";

	/* Binding a click event handler to the links: */
	$('li.button a').click(function(e){

		/* Finding the drop down list that corresponds to the current section: */
		var dropDown = $(this).parent().next();

		/* Closing all other drop down sections, except the current one */
		$('.dropdown').not(dropDown).slideUp('slow');
		dropDown.slideToggle('slow');

		/* Preventing the default event (which would be to navigate the browser to the link's address) */
		e.preventDefault();
	})

});

We first set the easing method that is going to be used by the slideUp/slideDown effects, and then bind a specially crafted function to the click event of the li.button hyperlink. When this link is clicked, we get the corresponding li.dropDown and show it, hiding all the others.

I am using the slideToggle jQuery method, which checks to see if the element is already visible on the page, and decides whether to show or hide it. This way, when you click on an open section of the accordion, it is contracted instead of just staying opened.

After this, we use e.preventDefault() to prevent the browser from navigating away from the page (after all we’ve just clicked a link and this is the normal behavior).

With this our fruity CSS & jQuery accordion is complete!

A CSS & jQuery accordion

Conclusion

This time we created a fresh accordion script that is both easily modifiable end embeddable.

Can you think of any awesome uses of this script?

How would you like to change it?

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Set 43 (12 actions)

Set 26 (6 actions)

Black white sepia

Photo Coloring II

Vintage Effect (6 actions)

Stylish Sepia

Photoshop Action

Red action

Nature Actions 2.09

sa-cool actions 2.06 (7 actions)

Retro.Vintage actions

Retro

Photo Coloring 11.2

Set 41 (4 actions)

Photoshop Actions Pack 5 (10 actions)

Photoshop Postwork Actions (50 actions)

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To win a set of 500 free full color double sided business cards from 1800 Postcards, simply leave a comment and tell us what you would use your set for.

Up for Grabs

• 3 Sets of 500 full color double sided business cards from 1800 Postcards (1 set per winner)

Rules

• Leave a comment to enter. Tell us what you would use your set for.
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• This is a 5 day contest. Entries will be accepted until Friday, December 11, 2009 at 11:59 PM EST.
• U.S. residents only.

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Icons are in transparent PNG format, black color & 32*32px in size.

Their colors can be customized easily as a group using layer styles & applying "Color Overlay" in Photoshop. For Fireworks, simply apply "Filters → Adjust Color → Color Fill" and choose your color.

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Tags: Mono, PNG

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Tutorial Details

• Requirements:
  • Basic Knowledge of jQuery
  • Basic Knowledge of Photoshop
  • Basic Knowledge of CSS
• Difficulty: Intermediate
• Estimated Completion Time: 40 mins

What is a CSS Sprite?

Sprites date back to the early days of video games, where they were used as optimization technique for displaying 2D graphics. A CSS sprite is a technique that involves grouping images to form a single master image, and then selectively displaying only the required sections using CSS attributes (width, height, background-position etc).

In this tutorial we’ll create a navigation menu inspired by Dragon Interactive. They have an excellent design concept, with a perfect use of highlights and colors.

Step 1

Begin by creating a new Photoshop document, which is 800px wide by 500px high.

Step 2

Next, we’ll create a horizontal ruler at the 70px mark by going to view -> new guide; this will be our menu height.

Step 3

Now we are going to create a folder menu, and inside it, a sub folder called “Menu Text.”

Step 4

Select the text tool(shortcut: t) and set the following properties in the character toolbox.

• Font: Franklin Gothic Medium Cond
• Font Size: 15pt
• Color: Black

Other fonts can be used as well but this font family is best suited for embedded text effect which we will give later. If you don’t have this font you can get it from Website.

Step 5

Create another horizontal ruler at 40px, this will help to keep our menu text horizontally aligned.

Step 6

Now select the menu text folder, and type the menu words HOME, SERVICES, PORTFOLIO, ABOUT, and CONTACT, keeping equal spaces between each. It should now look like the image below.

Step 7

Now create another folder below the menu text folder, and name it “Menu Background.”

Step 8

Let’s next create a new layer inside the Menu Background folder, and then using a rectangular marquee tool, create a selection of 100px wide and 70px high.

Step 9

Select the gradient tool (shortcut : g), and set the gradient colors from #555555 to #adadae .

Step 10

Now draw a gradient starting from the bottom of the selection to the top of the selection; then give it a stroke with the following properties:

• Stroke Size : 1px
• Position : outside
• Color : Black

The stroke was added to provide depth to our menu divisions.

Step 11

Now In order to achieve the highly polished ends, and to create the proper effect when the mouse hover occurs, we will give it an adjacent highlight.

Step 12

Go to select > modify > contract and enter 1px.

Step 13

Select the burn tool and set the following properties:

• Brush Size : around 200px
• Brush Hardness : 0%
• Range : Shadows
• Exposure :30%

Step 14

Now we will move the menu division right 1px, using the move tool(shortcut: v) in order to show the left side of the stroke, which was invisible due to its position.

Step 15

Create copies of the above layer and adjust them with respect to the menu text.

Two things that Must be Noted

• Transform (ctrl + t) and increase the size of the layer underneath SERVICES and PORTFOLIO, since they are wider than the other words. Change the length from 100px to 110px.
• The stroke of the adjacent layers must overlap each other.

This is what the menu looks like when we adjust the positioning of the layers and menu text accordingly.

Step 16

In order to embed the typographic effect, we add the “Drop Shadow” effect with the following settings to our text:

• Color: #b7b6b6
• Opacity: 40%
• Distance: 1px
• Spread: 100%
• Size: 0px

Step 17

Now, its time to create what the menu looks like during the mouse hover state. Create a copy of the “Menu Background” folder, and rename it to “Menu Hover.” Then, using the move tool, move the folder 70px down so that the newly created menu’s top part touches the horizontal guide.

The reason we have created the copy of the menu folder, is because we’re interested in the positioning of the menu text. If we had created it manually, then we would have to worry about the exact alignment of the menu’s text, which would be much more tedious.

Step 18

Now, we will select the background layer of the service menu from the “Menu Hover” folder, and give it a nice elegant effect upon the hover state. To do this, first create a selection by pressing ctrl and click on the layer; then press delete, which will delete the current shade. Next…

• Color – #9de0ff at 0% Location
• Color – #0072ff at 50% Location
• Color – #005ead at 100% Location

Select radial gradient, and draw a line from the bottom of the selection to 30px above the top of the selection.

Step 19

Our work is not done quite yet. To give it a smooth touch, we need to polish it a bit more. To create a more revealing menu division, we’ll make the edges darker. To achieve this, we need to add the following effects:

• Select the burn tool, with a brush size of 200px, range – highlight and exposure to 50%, brush it along the edges of the division.
• To make the edges even darker, we add an inner shadow effect:
  • Blend Mode : Hard light
  • Opacity : 70%
  • Distance: 0px
  • Choke: 0%
  • Size: 10px

Step 20

Apply a similar effect for the portfolio and about menus. For the contact menu, change the gradient colors to:

• Color – #ff9dbd at 0% Location
• Color – #ff0084 at 50% Location
• Color – #a00337 at 100% Location

This what our menu looks like now:

Step 21

The home menu division needs to be given special treatment; select the layer by pressing ctrl and clicking on the layer. Press delete to remove the current shade, and select the gradient tool with the following colors:

• Color – #fff5c0 at 0% Location
• Color – #fae15d at 50% Location
• Color – #eac500 at 100% Location

This time, select linear gradient, and draw a gradient from the top of the selection to the bottom of the selection.

Step 22

Select the burn tool, keeping the rest of the properties the same except for the range, set it to midtones, and apply brush strokes around the edges except for the top.

Step 23

Now to create the glassy effect: select the pen tool, make sure that “shape fill” is selected, and draw the shape like the one in the image, and set its blend mode to soft light with an opacity of about 40%.

Step 24

Two more things before we’re finished with the Photoshop part.

• First, the text effect within the “Menu Hover” folder is not looking elegant enough; so we change the color of the drop shadow property.
  • Home Menu
    • Color : #fff368
    • Opacity : 80%
    • Also add gradient-overlay : #854406 to b75a03
  • Services, Portfolio and About Menus
    • Color: #78bbff
    • Opacity : 70%
  • Contact Menu
    • Color : #f78bb6
    • opacity : 80%
• Second is the last division in Menu folder does not have an adjacent highlight to the right; so we’ll clip a small portion of the background layer, and align it next to the contact background layer. Then, we crop the image and save.

Finally our sprite image looks so:

Step 25

Now comes the coding section, which is quite easy. Create an html file, and add the following code:

<html>
<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.easing.1.3.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="sprite.js"></script>
<title>Awesome Menu</title>
</head>

<body>
<div id="nav">
<ul id="navigation">
	<li ><a class="home" href="#"></a></li>
	<li ><a class="services" href="#"></a></li>
	<li ><a class="portfolio" href="#"></a></li>
	<li ><a class="about" href="#"></a></li>
    <li ><a class="contact" href="#"></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Here we have created a simple html file, which consists of an unordered list – our navigation bar. Before moving forward, let’s take a look at a couple of files we’ll now be importing:

• style.css is the external CSS file in which we will be styling our navigation list.
• We’ve imported jQuery for the animation on hover.
• The jQuery easing plugin is also used, which we’ll review later.
• It’s good practice to create an external js file for our work, so we also do that in “sprite.js.”

Step 26

Create an external .js file, called sprite.js, and paste in the following code.

$(function(){

		   $('#navigation li a').append('');
           // span whose opacity will animate when mouse hovers.

		   $('#navigation li a').hover(
             function() {
	         $('.hover', this).stop().animate({
			'opacity': 1
			}, 700,'easeOutSine')
        	},
            function() {
	       $('.hover', this).stop().animate({
			'opacity': 0
			}, 700, 'easeOutQuad')

	})
		   });

When the DOM is loaded, we inject a span into our anchor tag; this span will actually animate. Then, using the hover function for the anchor tag, we animate the opacity of the span. To create a smoother animation, we will use the easing equation. I am using ‘easeoutsine’ and ‘easeoutquad’; feel free to try an alternative combinations, if you wish.

Step 27

Now comes the CSS part. Create the style.css file. Below is the initial image of what the menu looks like. For now, it’s only four dots, because we haven’t yet styled it.

Step 28

First, we align the list.

body{
background:#000000; }

#navigation
{
margin-left:250px;
}

#navigation li
{
float:left;
}

We’ve only moved the menu in the center a bit.

Step 29

Style the anchor tag; its background will be our sprite image.

#navigation li a
{
background-image:url(images/sprite.jpg);
display:block;
}

The display style must be set to block; otherwise, nothing will be displayed.

In the next step, we will give each of them the proper positioning.

	.home
	{
	background-position:0px 0px;
	width:102px;
	height:70px;
	}

	.services
	{
	background-position:-102px 0px;
	width:110px;
	height:70px
	}

	.portfolio
	{
	background-position:-212px 0px;
	width:108px;
	height:70px
	}

	.about
	{
	background-position:-320px 0px;
	width:102px;
	height:70px
	}

	.contact
	{
	background-position:-422px 0px;
	width:103px;
	height:70px
	}

Here, we’ve set the background positioning, and width of each anchor tag. The values may vary, and it requires a bit of time to get perfect.

Step 30

#navigation a .hover {
	background:url(images/sprite.jpg) no-repeat;
	display: block;
	opacity: 0;
	position: relative;
	top: 0;
	left: 0;
	height: 100%;
	width: 100%;
	}

	#navigation a.home .hover {
	background-position: -0px -72px;

	}
	#navigation a.services .hover{
	background-position: -102px -72px;

	}
	#navigation a.portfolio .hover {
	background-position: -212px -72px;
	}
	#navigation a.about .hover {
	background-position: -320px -72px;
	}
	#navigation a.contact .hover {
	background-position: -422px -72px;
	}

Now we will define the CSS for the span; this is the same sprite image which is used above. The height and width are made 100% so that it occupies the whole anchor block. The background of each span tag is adjusted, and finally our work is complete.

Step 31

Note that it takes time to get the position and width tuning right; you may end up with slightly different values for these attributes – and that’s perfectly okay!

CSS Sprites Resources

Phew seems like a lot of work, but great things take time to build up. Here are some additional resources that you might find handy.

• CSS Tricks has an awesome tutorial for beginners.
• Too tedious for you? Here’s a plugin that converts your sprite image into a menu.
• A MooTools fan? Check out this neat tutorial.
• cssSprites.com

• Follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to the Nettuts+ RSS Feed for the best web development tutorials on the web.

Go to Source

So welcome back to the final FYC edition of the popular Inspiration in Color series. Putting a twist in the post mission, we pull out all the stops here in the last post with a turn towards the entire spectrum. Inspiration in Spectrum : The FYC Edition, features another awesome collection of imaginative and emotive works from all around the design world that we hope you will be inspired by. Who knows where this inspiration will take you, but you will be the only one that can tell…

Graphic Design

Branding, Print & Packaging Design

Fashion and Make-up Design

Web Design

Photography

Wallpapers

That’s a Wrap!

That wraps up the series. So now the ball is in your court. If you have found yourself inspired by this series then by all means, please submit the end results of those inspirations to the FYC Flickr Group, and simply tag them ‘fycincolor’. Regardless of if you want to show us the work you created, we would love to hear your thoughts on this experimental inspirational process, so let your thoughts flow in the comment section below.

Sponsored by

Advertise on Fuel Your Creativity.
Fuel Your Creativity 2009 cc (creative commons license)

Inspiration in Spectrum: The FYC Edition

Go to Source

  

Pushing Your Buttons With Practical CSS3 (via @smashingmag) -

CSS3 is the partially implemented sequel to the CSS2 spec we all know and love. It’s already popping up in new browsers such as Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 and Chrome. In this article, the first of the articles that explore practical (and even far-fetched) implementation of CSS3, we start by applying CSS3 to something we all have to create: buttons.

Calls to action are critical for any website, and a compelling, attention-grabbing, clickable button goes a long way toward driving that engagement. In the past, really awesome buttons needed extra markup, sliding doors or other trickery. We’ll show you here how to create nice button styles without any hacks or cheats.

Step 1: The Super-Awesome Button

Some time ago we published a post titled “Super Awesome Buttons with CSS3 and RGBa.” Those buttons will be our first step to creating buttons that really click. We will briefly review the technique and then extend it, fixing the problems that we have encountered along the way.

Using Box-Shadow and RGBa

Our first goal when we were about to create a versatile family of buttons was to eliminate the problem that HEX-based drop-shadows have on different backgrounds. As you can see below, we can use box-shadow to create a drop-shadow, but the shadow color doesn’t work on both dark and light backgrounds. To get around that, we used a color model that is available in new browsers: RGBa.

RGBa works like the standard RGB model — 255, 255, 255 for white, for example — but has a fourth property that controls the alpha, or transparency, channel. In the buttons above, the gray shadow that we created for the white background is much too light against the dark background. However, using RGBa we can create a black shadow that is transparent. This allows the shadow to work against any kind of background:

button.awesome, .button.awesome {
	…
	-moz-box-shadow: 0 1px 3px rgba(0,0,0,0.5);
	-webkit-box-shadow: 0 1px 3px rgba(0,0,0,0.5);
	text-shadow: 0 -1px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.25);
	…
}

That solves our box-shadow problems. All that’s left is a dash of CSS properties and a simple PNG overlay to create a finished button that can be restyled with any color, on any background, and that will work just fine.

The Amazing Border-Radius

Creating objects with rounded edges has always been a mess on the Web; after all, every object on the Web is a rectangle. CSS3 makes our lives a little easier by implementing an incredibly easy way to round off objects without sliding doors or obnoxious background elements. With these buttons, we’re using a standard background color and a PNG overlay to give them depth. We are not using a background image to round the edges.

button.awesome, .button.awesome {
	…
	-moz-border-radius: 5px;
	-webkit-border-radius: 5px;
	…
}

Currently, Webkit (Safari, Chrome) and Firefox have slightly different implementations of border-radius. Webkit will round off functional elements (like images), while Firefox will not. However, both will very cleanly round off an object and mask the background image, color or both (as with our buttons).

If you get in close, you can see that the borders behave a little strangely at the pixel level, but for the most part border-radius is a great way to bring rounded edges into your design without the mess. Here’s the complete CSS for these buttons:

button.awesome, .button.awesome {
	…
	background: #222 url(/images/alert-overlay.png) repeat-x;
	display: inline-block;
	padding: 5px 10px 6px;
	color: #fff;
	text-decoration: none;
	font-weight: bold;
	line-height: 1;
	-moz-border-radius: 5px;
	-webkit-border-radius: 5px;
	-moz-box-shadow: 0 1px 3px rgba(0,0,0,0.5);
	-webkit-box-shadow: 0 1px 3px rgba(0,0,0,0.5);
	text-shadow: 0 -1px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.25);
	border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(0,0,0,0.25);
	position: relative;
	cursor: pointer;
	…
}

Final Touches

We’ve created the standard buttons you can see above, but another great thing about buttons that don’t use images is that we can create any color we want and with some simple class names generate an entire repertoire of buttons that we can call on any time. This is great for creating a reusable set of buttons that can be adapted to your or your clients’ style guide. Check out the color codes that we are using:

.blue.awesome {
	background-color: #2daebf;
}

.red.awesome {
	background-color: #e33100;
}

.magenta.awesome {
	background-color: #a9014b;
}

.orange.awesome {
	background-color: #ff5c00;
}

.yellow.awesome {
	background-color: #ffb515;
}

These simple classes allow us to quickly call on the button we want to get the action we need users to take. We’ve used similar methods in the buttons we’ll walk through in the next few sections.

Our last step is sizing. Without a sliding-doors situation our button size is only limited by the size of our overlay image (and in future buttons, not even by that). We’ll use a few classes (small, medium and large) to create sizes that we can call in different situations.

The buttons in various sizes: an overview.

And that’s it! A scalable, easily configured set of buttons that works in all browsers (through graceful degradation) and will get you the impact you want. In the next few sections we’ll build on these buttons to show you how CSS3 can push these even further in some interesting directions.

See the live demo »

We’ve created a live demo page for these buttons; it’s in a playground, where we create small side projects and cool toys. We’ll be linking to the playground examples throughout this post and the rest of our series.

A note about compatibility: true to form, IE8 does not support border-radius. At ZURB, we’ve adopted a “graceful degradation” paradigm, so these corners will be square in IE. In our experience, the additional development cost for elements like this is not worth it, and we rely on these properties to cleanly degrade and not damage the layout or readability. These buttons are no exception: they are still as clickable in IE as anywhere else, just not quite as pretty.

Step 2: Radioactive Buttons

Now that we’ve gotten our feet wet with CSS3, let’s go in a different direction. For a recent client project, we wanted to create a stylized, attractive and eye-catching call to action for the home page. We came up with the idea of a radioactive button, a button that actually pulses on the page for more attention.

Kitschy? Maybe a little. But despite its impracticality, for some websites and clients, the “Wow” factor—that feeling the user gets when they arrive at a website and say, “Oooh, ahhh!”—can’t be ignored. Where we only used to have , thanks to some tricks we’ve already covered (and one we haven’t), we can move beyond that terrifically obnoxious blink tag and explore a whole new range of opportunities to animate using pure CSS.

Animation: No JavaScript Required

The secret to the radioactive button is in a new CSS3 property called animation (or, as it currently exists, -webkit-animation and -moz-animation). Our radioactive buttons are structurally and stylistically identical to the buttons in step 1, but with one important change. In lieu of a static drop-shadow, we’ve used the box-shadow property to create a glow around the button. With “glowing shadow” added, the next step is to use CSS3 animation to dim and brighten it.

Creating the Animation

The first step in our radioactive awesomeness is to create a timed event that modifies existing CSS properties. Check out this odd-looking property:

@-webkit-keyframes greenPulse
{
	from {
		background-color: #749a02;
		-webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 9px #333;
	}
	50% {
		background-color: #91bd09;
		-webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 18px #91bd09;
	}
	to {
		background-color: #749a02;
		-webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 9px #333;
	}
}

Here’s how the code works:

• @-webkit-keyframes tells the browser that we’re defining an animation based on keyframes, or points in the animation to where properties will change. The browser then knows to smoothly transition between those frames.
• greenPulse is the name of the animation. We need this to attach to objects later on.
• from { … } defines the starting point of the animation; in our case, a certain background color for the button and a box-shadow color (particularly, one that disappears into the background).
• 50% { … } means that one change happens halfway through the animation.
• to { … } defines the last frame of the animation. Note that animations always return to their from state—they don’t stop on the last frame. This means that a smooth animation needs to begin and end with the same properties and values.

All right, we’ve created the animation. It takes an object and over a set time changes the box-shadow color to green and then back to gray. Now, we just have to make it active by applying the animation to our buttons.

.green.button {
	…
	-webkit-animation-name: greenPulse
	-webkit-animation-duration: 2s;
	-webkit-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
	…
}

Pretty cool, isn’t it? -webkit-animation has many potential uses and, when combined with some very simple JavaScript (like onclick), you can create very rich effects and interaction without resorting to a JavaScript effects library.

See the live demo »

Check out the live demo of radioactive buttons in our playground. For maximum awesomeness, check it out in Safari 4; radioactive buttons use some Webkit-specific properties that aren’t implemented well in Chrome quite yet.

Nice, Simple, User-Friendly Buttons, Google-Style

Our last example was inspired by some recent changes made to one of the most trafficked pages on the Web: the Google search page. In addition to enlarging the search field and text size, Google also rolled out some new buttons for Webkit-based browsers (notably its own, Chrome).

These buttons incorporate everything that makes our buttons in this article great, with one cool trick: no images at all. Google has used a new property called -webkit-gradient to generate a gradient using only CSS.

Using CSS Gradients

Gradients in CSS are cool because they are a CSS function, much like url(), which means that we can use gradients anywhere images go, including in the background or in borders (don’t worry, we’ll get to border-image in a later post). Here’s how gradients work:

.g-button {
	…
	background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, from(rgb(255, 255, 255)), to(rgb(98,202,227)));
	…
}

Let’s break this down:

• linear means this is a linear gradient, as opposed to radial. This changes the color across a single axis, rather than in concentric circles.
• 0% 0%, 0% 100% are coordinates. We’re saying that the gradient begins at 0% X, 0% Y and ends at 0% X, 100% Y: top-left corner to bottom-left corner. We could use top-left, bottom-left just as well.
• from(rgb(255, 255, 255)) is the starting color for the gradient. If the syntax looks familiar, it should be: it’s very similar to the syntax for @-webkit-keyframes.
• to(rgb(221, 221, 221)) is the ending color. While we have only used RGB here, you can see how gradients could get really interesting if we use RGBa and are able to control the opacity of points on the gradient.

The rest of the button is ordinary: padding, border-radius and all the fun things we’ve gone over so far. Gradients is the star here, though, and it has thousands of potential uses. Here, we’ve created (albeit in Google’s footsteps) rich, engaging buttons that are 100% CSS, no images required.

See the live demo »

You can see a live demo of these buttons in the playground, or simply visit the Google search home page in a Webkit browser.

Coming Up: Better, Stronger, Faster Design

This is the first of the articles that take advantages of the powerful new features coming in CSS 3. In the following posts, we’ll show you how CSS3 not only can make implementation faster and easier, but can help you really fly off the rails and push CSS to its breaking point while creating impressive visual effects.

Would you like to see more similar posts on Smashing Magazine in the future?(opinion)

Related posts

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• Zen Coding: A Speedy Way To Write HTML/CSS Code
• Designing CSS Buttons: Techniques and Resources
• Mastering CSS Coding: Getting Started
• Taming Advanced CSS Selectors

References and Resources

• RGBa Browser Support at CSS-Tricks
• Introduction to CSS Animation at Surfin’ Safari
• CSS3 Animation Tutorial at ZURB
• Introduction to CSS Transitions at CSS3.info
• Safari Visual Effects Documentation
• Using border-radius at The Art of Web

(al)

© Jonathan Smiley, Mark Otto for Smashing Magazine, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: buttons, css3, Design

Go to Source

Pixel Perfect Line Work

The designer of Image Spark, used a 1 px line along the top of the nav bar and around the bottom of the search field to make the edges pop. Anytime you have a lighter color next to a dark color, the lighter one will appear closer giving the illusion that there is a raised edge. Notice that the lines are only a few shades lighter than the background color. This is what makes the technique effective. If a white line was used, it would have been overpowering and the effect lost.

A similar technique is being used on atebits, but here it’s used to create dividers. Notice that they are made up of two 1px lines side by side, one dark and one light. This gives the illusion of an inset groove. Another nice touch is how the ends of the lines fade away instead of ending abruptly.

Shadows with Restraint

Shadows are a great way to give a design depth, but when creating shadows, it’s important to not over do it. Photoshop’s drop shadow effect can be a dangerous thing when in the wrong hands. The intensity of a shadow should have a lot to do with the color of the background. A darker background will require a darker shadow, and a lighter background a lighter shadow.

The designer of Fubiz uses a subtle shadow below the nav bar to give the illusion that it is raised off the page.

For fun, let’s see what would happen if the designer went a little crazy with the shadow. Take a look at the image below. The result appears to be quite amateurish.

The official site for the White House has shadows everywhere, but since they are all done subtly, the site maintains a very clean appearance.

Simple Gradients

Gradients are such a simple effect to create. They can be used to achieve various results, such as giving the illusion of a light source or creating depth, but again the key is to keep it subtle. The change in color from one end of the gradient to the other should be minute.

Tapbots uses a simple gradient in the background to make it appear that a light source is illuminating the iPhones. Subtle details like this contribute to pulling the entire design together. In this case, the gradient plays a big role in making the reflections of the iPhones believable.

The tabs on MetaLab each have a gradient fill. This give the illusion of depth and that they are slightly raised. MetaLab is also an excellent example of the pixel perfect detail mentioned above.

Precise Textures

Textures are often used to fill a large area. This is an easy and quick way to add a lot of interest to a design, but textures can also be used in a more precise manner to add multiple layers of subtle details.

Try to overlook the shameless self promotion here. On my portfolio, I used plenty of textures to give it that worn and weathered look. However, instead of just being content with filling the larger areas with texture, I took it a step further and used bits and pieces of texture to add more detail along the edges.

Liam McKay is the master of creating subtle grunge effects in his designs. On his blog, he uses subtle grunge textures that are perfectly placed to accent the content instead of distracting. Notice how even the 1px border lines have a worn look.

Go to Source

Bright colors can scare off a lot of web designers, especially when you use a few of them together. It takes more care and precision to create a design that uses eye-popping color well, without being overwhelming or looking amateurish. And if you’re combining contrasting colors, extra care needs to be taken to prevent your design from being jarring.

The blog designs featured below make excellent use of bright colors. Most use multiple colors together, though a few take a more monocromatic approach. Some are set against dark backgrounds; others are set against white. And in case you don’t want to jump into an original design like these, there are a number of blog templates at the end that use similar bright color schemes.

Here are more examples of beautiful blog design we’ve previosly showcased:

• 100 Nice and Beautiful Blog Designs
• Beautiful and Enticing Blog Design
• Blog Footer Design

Full list after jump.

Original Blog Designs

The sites below are original, one-of-a-kind designs, perfect to lend some inspiration to your own designs.

WebDesigner Wall
WebDesignerWall’s site uses a wide range of colors and a hand-drawn design. It’s artistic and fun, a perfect look for the site’s content.

Web Design Hobart
Web Design Hobart uses a bright watercolor design for its background with lime green accents, while the rest of the site’s design elements are a bit more subdued.

Brija.com
Bruja uses a more limited pallette, though the bright red and yellow are still very eye-catching.

Design Disease
Design Disease’s site uses a cyan blue and lime green, with additional shades of each color used throughout the rest of the site, and a few other bright accents.

Cult-foo
Using bright colors against a muted background color (like gray) makes the colors pop even more, as shown by Cult-foo’s website.

Danilo Fiocco
The bright colors and cartoon character lend a very informal feel to Danilo Fiocco’s site.

Eric Dies
The lime green really stands out against the gray background on Eric Dies’s site.

Designministeriet
Cyan and lime green with hot pink accents makes Designministeriet’s site feel very modern and young.

Dezine Zync
A bright background stands out more when mixed with transparent elements, as shown on Dezine Zync’s website.

Dreamling.ca
Mixing slightly muted bright colors with a white background gives Dreamling.ca’s a very feminine look.

Depthinfinity
Depthinfinity’s site combines a bright, multi-colored background with lime green and other bright accents to create a very fun and artistic site.

Ezobase
Ezobase uses a CMYK (Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black) color scheme, which looks very fresh on a website.

Joshua Giblette
Shades of a single color when set against a neutral background can have a huge visual impact, as displayed on Joshua Giblette’s website.

Nimbupani Designs
Mixing multiple bright colors can be tricky, but is executed well on the Nimbupani Designs site.

Krftd
A bright, graffiti-esque background is mixed with cyan accents within the text to really make Krftd’s site pop.

Super Girl
Super Girl is another great example of bright colors used with a white background to create a feminine look.

TruSpeaks
Combining a header with bright colors with a bright but monochromatic background makes the content on the TruSpeaks site stand out and creates a very modern and hip feeling.

Almost-Famous.TV
Combining a single bright color with a white background makes Almost-Famous.TV’s site look very pulled together while allowing the layout to look like it’s trying to break free from its grid-based design.

Entropia Blog
Mixing very bright colors both in the text and background image makes the Entropia Blog look fun and fresh.

Brian Jeremy Kupetz
A graffiti-esque painted background mixed with accents that take their color cues from the background itself make for a very pulled-together yet lively look.

Ilovecolors
Ilovecolors mixes bright colors with grunge-influenced elements to create a very unique design.

Moradito
The bright, pixelated background of Moradito really stands out when it’s combined with transparency and a few colored accents.

Hello My Name is Heather
A lime green background and brightly-colored header combined with bright accents and images within posts makes for a very cheerful design on the Hello My Name is Heather site.

Duirwaigh Studios – Message from the Muse
Duirwaigh Studio’s Message from the Muse blog mixes bright colors with a vintage-inspired design to create a background that really pops.

Veerle’s Blog
The steel-gray background of Veerle’s Blog mixed with bright orange accents and a bright header looks very original.

Inspiredology
A rainbow-colored header image combined with cyan and magenta accents makes the Inspiredology site look welcoming and original.

Celebrific
Celebrific’s bright pink and light blue color scheme really pops and makes the site’s content really stand out.

Colorful Blog Themes

If you’re unsure of designing a bright theme from scratch, turn to one of the pre-made themes below.

WP Coda
The WP Coda theme’s purple design mixed with brighter accents lends a very fresh but still professional look.

Acosmin Grungy
The Acosmin Grungy theme combines bright colors with grunge elements to give an edgy feeling.

Infinity
The Infinity theme makes great use of transparency mixed with bright colors and cartoonish illustrations.

Colourise
The Colourise theme’s dark background makes the bright colors stand out even more and lends a very masculine feel.

Notepad Chaos
Notepad Chaos’s theme combines a bright background with a limited color pallette to give a fresh and informal look.

Tribal Music Theme
The graffiti-inspired look of the Tribal Music Theme makes it feel very young and hip.

Lightsource
The Lightsource theme is available in multiple monochromatic color schemes, all of which lend a fresh feeling to any blog.

Ambience
Ambience is a great theme that mixes bright colors with transparency.

Digital Farm
The Digital Farm theme mixes a very bright, illustrated header with an otherwise muted color scheme, and is a very young and fun theme.

Color3
Color3 mixes a brightly-colored background with bright green accents and very subtle transparency.

Colors
Colors is another great theme that mixes a very bright, neon-colored background, a bright header, and bright accents.

Anatomyinc
The Anatomyinc theme is an artistic-looking theme with transparency and a bright background.

Liquid Magazine
The Liquid Magazine theme’s half-tone inspired background is bright without taking focus away from the content.

About Author – Cameron Chapman is a professional Web and graphic designer with over 7 years of experience. She writes for a number of blogs, including her own, Cameron Chapman On Writing. She’s also the author of Internet Famous: A Practical Guide to Becoming an Online Celebrity.

Go to Source

In this Photoshop type treatment tutorial for beginners, you’ll discover a quick and easy process for making captivating gradient text. Be sure to check out the Gradient Typography in Web Design showcase for inspiration.

Final Result

Below, you can see what we’ll be creating together. You can click on the image to see the full-resolution version.

Set up the Photoshop document

1 To start, let’s set up the Photoshop document. In Photoshop, Press Ctrl + N to create a new document (this should open the New Document dialog box). We’ll create a rectangular canvas that’s 600px wide and 300px tall.

Design the background of the text

2 We’ll use a dark blue background. First, we’ll need to make the Background layer editable because it’s locked by default. Double-click on the Background layer in the Layers Panel to open the New Layer dialog box. By default, the Name option is set to Layer 0, but to keep things organized, name it to something more descriptive like Background.

3 We’ll apply a color overlay layer style onto the Background layer. Start by double-clicking on the Background layer’s thumbnail in the Layers Panel to open up the Layer Styles dialog box. Check the Color Overlay box to apply the layer style.

4 Change the color overlay by clicking on the Set color of overlay option which will open the Select overlay color dialog box for you to choose your colors in.

5 In the Select overlay color dialog box, choose a dark color. I’ve chosen a dark blue color (#032d50).

Create a lighting effect in the background

6 The background should now be a dark blue color. Let’s make it a little bit more interesting by creating some lighting. First, create a new layer by clicking on the Create a new layer icon at the bottom of the Layers Panel. Then rename the new layer (by default it’ll be Layer 1) to something intuitive like Lightsource.

7 Set your Foreground color in the Tools Panel to white (#ffffff). Grab the Brush Tool (B) from the Tools Panel.

8 In the Options bar, open the Brush Preset picker by clicking on the downward pointing arrow. Scroll down and select the Soft Mechanical 500 pixels Brush (or choose any brush tip that has a soft edge). Adjust the Master Diameter option to a large value, 700px will do the trick.

9 In the Layers Panel, make sure you’re still on the Lightsource layer. With the Brush Tool, click somewhere in the middle of your canvas to apply the brush. It’s OK if the brush edge is outside of the canvas, it’ll create a nice effect that way.

10 The brush is too prominent so we’ll want to lower the layer opacity to make the lighting effect subtler. Lower the Opacity of the Lightsource layer to somewhere around 35% in the Layers Panel.

Placing the text on the canvas

11 Let’s type in the text that will have the gradient effect. We’ll use a bold sans-serif font–Arial–which really works well with the gradient typography style. Begin by choosing the Horizontal Type Tool (T) in the Tools Panel. Then in the Options bar, select Arial, set the font size to 72px, set the anti-aliasing method option to Sharp, and choose a color that we can easily see, such as white (#ffffff) (it doesn’t matter what color we choose now because the gradient overlay that we’ll be applying later on will take care of this).

12 Type some words onto the Canvas like "Gradient Type". Don’t worry where it is on the canvas because we’ll center it in the next step.

Centering the text

13 To center the text horizontally, first create a marquee selection around the entire canvas by pressing Ctrl + A (or going to Select > Select All).

14 With the Gradient Type text layer the active layer in the Layers Panel, go to Layers > Align Layers to Selection > Horizontal Centers. This should center the text in the horizontal middle of your canvas.

15 Next, we’ll want to center our text vertically as well. The rectangular marquee selection around the canvas should still be active, but it not, make sure it is (and press Ctrl + A if it isn’t) and then go to Layers Align Layers to Selection > Vertical Centers.

Applying the layer styles for the gradient type effect

16 Time to actually create the gradient type effect. Double-click on the Gradient Type text layer in the Layers Panel to open the Layer Styles Dialog box.

17 First layer style we’ll add to our text is a gradient overlay. We’ll want a color transition that’s white at the top and light gray at the bottom. It will be a subtle gradient type effect. So click on the Gradient Overlay checkbox to apply it. By default, it will be a Black to White color transition, so we’ll need to modify it.

18 Click on the Gradient option to open the Gradient Editor dialog box.

19 In the Gradient Editor, click on the left color stop to open the Select stop color dialog box. Change the color to a light gray color (#d7d7d7). Make sure that the right color stop is white (#ffffff), by the default it’s white, but in case you have changed the settings, you should verify.

20 Next, we’ll add a drop shadow layer style. Check the box beside Drop Shadow. Lower the Opacity of the drop shadow to about 50% so that it’s subtler. Change the Angle of the drop shadow to 90% so that our light source comes from the top of the canvas. Set the Distance to 3px (which means the drop shadow is offset by 3px at the bottom of the text) and the Size to about 8px. Play around with the settings to see what works best for you.

21 The final layer style we’ll apply is a white inner stroke. This is a subtle effect but really helps complete the whole gradient text effect. Open the Layer Styles dialog box again by double-clicking on the Gradient Type text layer. Check the box beside Stroke. Set the Stroke Size option to 2px. Set the Position option to Inner so that it’s applied at the inner edge of the type. Finally, lower the Opacity percentage just a tad, to about 90% So that the stroke is not too overpowering.

We’re done!

That’s it, below, you’ll see what I ended up with. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and learned a trick or two!

Contribute to the Six Revisions Flickr group

If you liked this tutorial and you followed along with it, please show your appreciation by including a screen capture of your final result in the Six Revisions Flickr group – we’re trying to build the collection so that we, as a community, can see each other’s work.

Download the source file

If you’d like to download the Photoshop source file used in this tutorial, grab it as an archived ZIP file below.

• gradient-typography.zip (ZIP, 0.2MB)

Related Content

• How to Create Remarkable 3D Text in Photoshop
• How to Create Inset Typography in Photoshop
• How to Make a Light and Sleek Web Layout in Photoshop
• Related categories: Tutorials and Photoshop

About the Author

Jacob Gube is the Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisions. He’s also a web developer/designer who specializes in front-end development (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) and PHP development. If you’d like to connect with him, head on over to the contact page and follow him on Twitter: @sixrevisions.

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One color that has been trending lately is teal. Teal has a very disarming quality that seems to welcome you in and invites you for tea. In this collection, we share 25 websites displaying great use of the color teal.

1. Owltastic

2. Brooklyn Fare

3. The Alamo Basement

4. E-Systems Organizers

5. That Game Company

6. Bidsketch

7. Feed Stitch

8. Orman Clark

9. Blueray

10. Adlucent

11. Plinky

12. Straw Poll

13. Skype

14. From The Couch

15. Jan-Eike Koormann

16. Epic Event

17. Girl Scouts of Middle Tennessee

18. Squared Eye

19. Gist

20. Francesco Mugnai

21. Kyan

22. Vimeo

23. Babel Junior

24. Volll

25. Blue Bonnet Cafe

Related Content

• Beautiful and Creative Examples of Vibrant Web Designs
• How to Use Retro Colors in Your Designs
• Color: The Next Limited Resource?
• Related categories: Design Showcase / Inspiration and Web Design

About the Author

Chris Spada is a designer living in Danbury, Connecticut. By day, he works for Plaid, a design and branding agency. He is passionate about studying new techniques and styles emerging in web design. Check out Chris’ latest work at www.chrisspada.com. Connect with him on Twitter: @spadachris.

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1. A Solid Layout

The importance of having a good foundation applies to just about everything in life. If the foundation is wrong, everything that is put on top of it will probably fail. In web design, the foundation is your layout. Laying out a web design involves placing all the content and navigational elements. You want to establish a hierarchy in these elements that gives the most important ones prominence, and this should be determined by how you think your audience will use the site.

Use Wireframes

A common practice by web designers to nail down a layout is to create a wireframe, which is basically a bare-bones representation of the various elements that will appear on the page. Wireframes are typically made up of gray scale boxes and blocks of placeholder text. The key is to keep things simple and not get caught up in color and design elements.

Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain of 31Three is great about posting his design processes on his blog. Here is an example wireframe he created for the Embrace Pet Community project.

Be generous with whitespace

One key aspect of a great layout is more about what’s in between (or rather not in between) your various page elements. I’m talking about whitespace or negative space. Many designers make the mistake of over crowding their web designs. Don’t be afraid to let your pages breathe. Adding larger amounts of whitespace will actually give your design a more sophisticated look.

With so much going on in the layout of The Swish Life, Liam McKay realized how important it was to use wide margins around the content to give this design an open and airy feel while making it easy to skim over all of the text. Notice how much empty space is around the blocks of content. This makes it easier for the user to focus in on what’s important.

Mutant Labs is another great example of good use of whitespace. It gives this dark design an open feel and lets the subtle chalk board texture and doodles room to show through.

Learn more about layout and wireframes

Wireframes Magazine is a blog written by information architects and interaction designers that has lots of info and examples of layouts and wireframing.

2. Effective Typography

Just like layout, typography plays an important role in how a user digests the content of a website. It’s important for a web design’s typography to be easy to read and follow while establishing structure and hierarchy within the content.

Big = important

31Three uses all caps and a large font size for the titles and subtitles. This establishes a clear hierarchy that distinguishes the headings as having more importance than the paragraph below.

Make it legible

By using high contrast between the text and the background, Dan Cederholm made the text on Simple Bits very easy to read. Also notice the amount of line spacing used in the paragraphs. Always make sure to use enough to make a body of text easy to read. This normally requires some experimentation, but a good rule of thumb is to set the line height to 1.5em, which is 1.5 times greater than the font size.

Learn more about typography

If you want to learn more about typography, we’ve compiled a list of great sites about the subject, and we’ve also go a list of tools to help you with typography on the web.

3. The Right Color Scheme

Choosing the right color scheme is extremely important, because it will set the mood of your design more so than any other component. Don’t let your own personal taste determine what colors you use. That should be based on what’s trying to be achieved with the site and what you know about it’s audience.

Dare to be different

The Gap Medics site features a bold choice of colors that goes against everything we are used to seeing on medical related sites. It’s appropriate since the site is trying to attract young medical students. The colors help give the site a young hip feel that softens seriousness of the subject matter.

Sometimes little color is the right color

Carsonified basically only uses two colors. The dark brown and a creamy white compliment the vintage poster style and design elements. Sometimes a minimal color palette is all you need.

Need help choosing the right color scheme?

Adobe’s Kuler is a community driven web app that lets your browse color palettes created by others. You can also create your own by using the color wheel, harmony rules, and color sliders. There are also other tools to help you choose the right colors.

4. Appropriate Design Elements

This is where you can have a lot of fun with a design. Your creativity can go wild here with texture, icons, patterns, etc. However, keep in mind that design elements also play a big role in setting the mood of the design. So keep things consistent with the goals of the website and it’s audience. Also keep the design elements consistent with the other three components we’ve already mentioned.

Consistency in action

The designer of Red Velvet Art did an excellent job of utilizing the same hand drawn style throughout the various design elements. Notice how the icons, background pattern and doodles all work together. The consistency also flows through to the typography and retro color scheme.

Attention to detail

The Squarespace blog has a typical blog layout and an overall clean design, but notice the pixel perfect tick marks that line the left and right borders of the content area. It’s such a minimal design element, but it serves it’s purpose in establishing focus on the content while staying consistent with the rest of the design.

Less really is more

This design could have worked well on a white background, but Elliot Jay Stocks loves using texture. To stay consistent with the open feel of the site, he went with a light and subtle grunge texture. It works because it doesn’t take away from the minimalism of the layout and still adds another layer of interest to the design.

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Green & Black’s, (whose chocolate packaging has been featured more than once on the dieline) has done a modest packaging refresh.

They’ve reversed the brown and accent color areas of the packs so that what was once mainly brown with an accent color is now the other way round.

To promote the more color-dominant packaging, they’ve commissioned Peter Blake to make this artwork of their new packaging in a mosaic-like arrangement. (They’re also holding a contest for a additional mosaic designs.)

(Another photo, after the fold…)

No stranger to consumer packaged goods, Blake has also done work for Coca Cola, Lucky Brand, Cains Beer and others. As one of the original British Pop Artists, of course, he also draws on packaging in his work for the “fine art” market.

box vox

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Welcome back once again to the FYC edition of the popular Inspiration in Color series. This series of posts focuses on images that are made up of a primarily, or at least a predominantly, singular selected color. As we wind the series down, we come this week to a collection of neutral colors. Inspiration in Neutral : The FYC Edition, features another awesome collection of imaginative and emotive works from all around the design world with two distinct purposes. The first, of course, is to inspire you, but also to see whether or not that inspiration tends to manifest elements that are associated with the color of choice. Absence, power, mystery, style, evil, purity, peace, innocence, humility, surrender, calm, depth, nature, stability, fascism, and poverty are all common associations with neutral colors. Who knows where this inspiration will take you, but you will be the only one that can tell…

Graphic Design

Branding and Print Design

Fashion and Make-up Design

Web Design

Interior Design

Photography

Wallpapers