I can’t believe I’ve never seen this before. One of those most common complains with CSS frameworks (like BlueTrip…ahem) is that they include a lot of code that you won’t ever use (you’re probably never going to have a project where you use EVERY single column width or EVERY single possible typographical markup.

Let there be Dust-Me Selectors. It’s is a Firefox extension that finds unused CSS selectors and notifies you so you can remove them from your stylesheets. Awesome.

Mac and XP users get all the love. How many times have you used a font family like Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif? Look familiar? With articles like Christian Montoya’s floating around, more and more designers are adding Vista-only fonts to their stylesheets. And yet, nobody is throwing anything in for Linux users, instead relying on the generic fallback to handle it.

(more…)

I’ve always been a proponent of reset stylesheets. Jonathan Snook made an almost convincing argument against them a few months ago, which was backed up by Jens Meiert quite well.

(more…)

On a recent project, I worked with a lesser known and charming little CMS known as Textpattern (or “Txp” to its users). The decision came after a long and drawn out process of researching and theming various CMS solutions to see what would be the easiest to develop (there was a time constraint) and what would be the easiest to maintain for a non-technical manager.

(more…)

So the last CSS post (you know, the one for newbies? I know you read it! You read them ALL!) wasn’t advanced enough for you? Well you’ll feel right at home here. This time, I’ll take you through 10 CSS tips that experienced designers either somehow haven’t discovered or have learned and forgotten (which happens all to often in the coding world).

(more…)

Web design is (or perhaps should be) all about good practices and web standards. In spite of that, it’s pretty amazing how many designers just learn by doing and do what works rather than what’s good. Here are a few tips I wish I had been told about from the start.

1. Include a color scheme in your stylesheets

That way, when you’re creating a border color for some random form element and you can’t remember exactly what shade of light blue you have been using, you don’t have to search through the CSS declarations until you find it. Here’s an example from yours truly, CapsizeDesigns.com:

(more…)

For a project we’ve been working on, I recently had to implement a calendar in PHP to show upcoming events. The solution was a wee bit tricky (and pretty annoying), so here it is in all it’s glory, in case someone else is looking. It’s pretty easily skinnable, and very scalable, so it should fit in nicely with your project.

(more…)