Topic: Graphic Design

• CSS Drop Shadows

  by Sergio Villarreal · Issue 172 · February 27, 2004

  Much used, oft maligned but always popular, drop shadows are a staple of graphic design. Although easy to accomplish with image-editing software, they’re not of much use in the fast-changing world of web design … until now.

• CSS Drop Shadows II: Fuzzy Shadows

  by Sergio Villarreal · Issue 178 · April 23, 2004

  Picking up where Part I left off, in Part II designer Sergio Villarreal takes his standards-compliant drop-shadow to the next level by producing warm and fuzzy shadows.

• Separation: The Web Designer’s Dilemma

  by Michael Cohen · Issue 181 · May 14, 2004

  Presentation separated from structure. Structure separated from content. The foot bone connected to the ... what were we talking about? Michael Cohen steps in to examine our assumptions and relieve our separation anxiety.

• Art Direction and the Web

  by Stephen Hay · Issue 180 · May 07, 2004

  If design lives in the details, art direction’s turf is the Big Idea. Stephen Hay introduces the principles and techniques of the art director, and shows how art directional concepts can shape memorable user experiences.

• Print It Your Way

  by Derek Featherstone · Issue 182 · May 21, 2004

  Because ALA’s readers are web users as well as designers and developers, we offer this tidbit from Derek Featherstone on creating user stylesheets to print articles to your own specifications.

• Onion Skinned Drop Shadows

  by Brian Williams · Issue 182 · May 21, 2004

  Animators use onion skinning to render a snapshot of motion across time. Now, web designers can use this technique to create the truly extensible CSS-based drop shadow.

• Dynamic Text Replacement

  by Stewart Rosenberger · Issue 183 · June 15, 2004

  Let your server do the walking! Whether you’re replacing one headline or a thousand, Stewart Rosenberger’s Dynamic Text Replacement automatically swaps XHTML text with an image of that text, consistently displayed in any font you own. The markup is clean, semantic, and accessible. No CSS hacks are required, and you needn’t open Photoshop or any other image editor. Read about it today; use it on personal and commercial web projects tomorrow.

• CSS Design: Creating Custom Corners & Borders

  by Søren Madsen · Issue 165 · December 04, 2003

  Must CSS layouts be boxy and hard-edged? In this article, we’ll show how customized borders and corners can be applied to fully fluid and flexible layouts with dynamic content, using sound and semantically logical markup.