You’ve designed for the screen and made provision for blind, handheld, and PDA browser users. But what about low-vision people? Powered by CSS, “zoom” layouts convert wide, multicolumn web pages into low-vision-friendly, single column designs. Accessibility maven Joe Clark explores the rationale and methods behind zoom layouts. Board the zoom train now!
Topic: Graphic Design
A Better Image Rotator
The first image rotator made it easy to generate a random image on a web page, even if you had never worked with PHP before. The new, more powerful (but still dead easy) version uses a simple configuration file to create custom links, alt tags, titles, and even CSS styles for each image. Plus it handles differently sized images without a hiccup. Enjoy!
Dynamic Text Replacement
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.
Onion Skinned Drop Shadows
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.
Print It Your Way
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.
Separation: The Web Designer’s Dilemma
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
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.
Mountaintop Corners
Most of us have experience creating “rounded” corners by erasing pixels. It’s a rudimentary web design technique — or so we always thought. But in the hands of Dan Cederholm, author of Web Standards Solutions, this seemingly simple technique paves the way for boxes and borders that can change sizes and colors at your whim.
CSS Drop Shadows II: Fuzzy Shadows
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.
Zebra Tables
While misused tables are becoming increasingly rare, the table retains a legitimate role in data formatting. A little CSS and JavaScript magic can make tables better at what they do best: displaying tabular data.
