Drop caps are a nice typographic detail that look great on many websites; I’ve used these myself on several examples including Just Holiday Nannies (main page headings) and Occupational Synergy (leading paragraphs). There are a few ways of achieving this effect but the CSS selector I like to use is the :first-letter pseudo-element. This selector is reasonably well supported across most modern browsers (albeit with a few minor bugs here and there). Here’s how it works.
I like to browse a lot of websites with the aim of learning from how others do things. I figure that this is part of my job as a freelance web designer/developer. However, sometimes it is difficult to know what went on during the design process of any website you look at. That’s why I particularly like blog posts, articles, and other case studies, where a website design is explained. Normally, this will deconstruct the website in question and I find these really useful. Here are a few case study ‘design stories’ that I have been reading recently:
All these chaps are talented designers and more than likely they will also do things differently to you. It makes sense to try and learn from them….
The CSS3 box-shadow property is a new way of adding drop shadow effects just by editing a style sheet. There’s no need to use Photoshop! Just open your style sheet in a text editor and away you go. Well, it’s almost as simple as that but not quite. There’s one caveat and that is browser support. The box-shadow property is supported by Firefox and Safari, using their proprietary -moz- and -webkit- prefixes, but it’s not supported by Internet Explorer (or other browsers). For this reason, I think the box-shadow property is ideal for adding image link hover effects where the shadow is not absolutely essential but where it provides a nice style enhancement (enrichment) for modern browsers.
One of the subjects that I have been keeping an eye on recently is the use of JavaScript to enhance support for more advanced CSS methods in Internet Explorer (IE). We all know that, despite some big improvements, Internet Explorer 8 does not support some of the newer CSS properties used by Firefox and Safari, which tend to lead the way in this respect.
A few goodies from my CSS reading list:
Flexible Web Design by Zoe Mickley Gillenwater describes how to build fluid and elastic CSS layouts. It's a great read!
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