improved IE performance<
Typography: Baseline Rhythm Deciphered
at 2007-08-12 11:35:50
Have your pages got rhythm?
In a previous post I reported on Richard Rutter and Mark Boulton’s web typography presentation at SXSW, where Richard explained the importance of ensuring that the text on your page maintains a “vertical rhythm”.
If you haven’t explored this concept yet, allow me to explain: if you were to overlay your text with equidistant horizontal lines (as if your page was a lined notebook from high school) then those lines should land perfectly between each of the lines of text on the page, regardless of whether the text is a heading, a regular paragraph, a sidebar … whatever. When this occurs, your page is said to have vertical rhythm — the text is easier to read than text that doesn’t line up, as it feels more cohesive and less disjointed.
Fireworks CS3 Features: Intelligent Scaling
at 2007-08-12 11:35:50
Republished from SitePoint Design View #33
Adobe’s first take on Fireworks — CS3, or version 9 in the old money — has finally been released into the wild and is getting some good press. As we only received the full review edition last week, I’ll publish a full wrap-up in the next Design View, but for the time being I thought I’d look at one of the package’s nicest new features: intelligent or “9-slice” scaling.
Symbols — in Flash or Fireworks — have always been a great concept. If you use a bit of CSS, there’s something quite familiar about being able to define a permanent reference graphic, then use linked instances or copies of that graphic in your artwork. Changes to the symbol automatically flow through to copies, just as CSS changes flow through to your document.
The biggest drawback I’ve always
The Art & Science of CSS Rounded Corners (and beyond)
at 2007-08-12 11:35:50
As you may well have noticed by now, our new advanced CSS book — The Art & Science Of CSS — has been officially released across the site, although it’s been available for a little while if you’d looked.
If you’re interested but held off purchasing till now, you’re in luck. Use this link to get a $10 discount on The Art & Science of CSS PLUS select a free poster of your choice (DHTML/CSS/Linux/PHP).
Make no mistake: this offer au
Photoshop CS3 New Features: #1 - Quick Selection Tool
at 2007-08-12 11:35:49
So, we’ve had the Adobe CS3 web and design suites for two weeks now and we’re starting to really get a feel for the improvements. As you might expect with such a large cross-section of applications, some have eveolved more than others — at this stage my view is Fireworks and Photoshop have some pretty nifty new tricks while Dreamweaver’s improvements seem to be less far reaching than CSS reinvention in version 8.
With any upgrade decision, it usually comes down to three factors:
- Will it run OK on my current system?
- What are the new goodies?
- Do I have the cash?
Question #3 only you can answer.
The answer to question #1 seems to be ‘yes, each application seems to run at least as quickly as CS2, usually quicker’. In fact, the startup time for Photoshop CS3 is less than 10 seconds on my system compared with well over 20 for CS2, with similar result