OptimWise - Web Design & Development Simpsonville/Greenville SC

Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this visual book, Dan Cedarholm and Ethan Marcotte demonstrate 3 principles of “handcrafted CSS” through several specific examples. The examples feature border-radius, RGBA, modular floats, fluid grids, typography, and jQuery. The examples won’t age well, but the concepts certainly will.

I liked the advice that one should be an “80 percenter”, focusing on the details that matter rather than obsessing over complex solutions. I read this book because it was listed in .net Magazine's The top 25 books for web designers and developers.

Aspects of handcrafted CSS

• bulletproof design: designing with flexibility and adaptability
• progressive enrichment: rewarding advanced browsers while allowing others to degrade acceptably
• reevaluation of past methods and best practices: finding easier, more efficient ways to solve problems

Notes

• Opacity affects the transparency of the element and anything contained in it. RGBA affects only the transparency of the element’s background or color.
• Check your site's stats and design for the browsers your users use.
• Find free fonts at Jos Buivenga's exljbris Font Foundry.
• target / context = result
  • target font size in px / font size of container in px = desired font size in ems
  • can also be used to calculate em or percentage based widths