CSS techniques

I’m extremely proud to say that two weeks ago Fontdeck opened its doors to the type-loving public. It’s been a long time in coming – too long I’d admit – but Fontdeck is now live and I’m hugely excited about what’s to come.

At Typ09, FontShop put together Webfonts Week, a series of interviews with leading type designers. There is universal support for webfonts now, even from those who were dead set against it a year ago.

When inline images are displayed in box with -webkit-border-radius applied to it, the image is not cropped as expected. There is a simple workaround, at least for Safari.

The font-stretch property was removed from CSS 2 in the transition to CSS 2.1. Unfortunately this leaves us with a rather gaping hole in overall font support.

A free font has made it into MyFonts’s top ten list of best selling typefaces. There’s a lesson there somewhere.

There’s more to the lives of many typefaces than just Bold and Regular, but almost no browsers follow the proper CSS 1 way of specifying Light, Semibold, Black and other weights. There is a workaround, but it’s nasty.

This Friday, 24th October 2008, I’ll be presenting as part of Head, a three-day global web conference. My talk is entitled Facing up to Fonts in which I get to talk more about web typography for the first time in ages. Update: Win a ticket!

The CSS 3 font module has come back to life, and web designers have been asked for the their wish lists. Here’s mine.

I’ve been an avid reader of A List Apart for many years. It’s been a long-standing source of information, inspiration and even spiritual guidance. And so it is with immense pleasure and pride that I can finally say that I am an ALA author.

Thomas Phinney, Adobe’s Fonts Product Manager for & Global Typography has posted a survey asking Web designers/developers about different implementations of @font-face.

Earlier this week it was announced that WebKit now supports CSS @font-face rules. There has been a mixed reception in some quarters, but this leap forward (for that’s what it is) has to be a good thing.

Håkon Wium Lie recently intimated that the forthcoming release of Opera will support downloadable fonts. Great news for web designers, but is it bad news for type foundries?

Interest in Web typography has really picked up over the past year. One subject in particular has piqued people’s interest: vertical rhythm and alignment of baselines. Here’s a compilation of tutorials on the subject.

The Web Typography project continues to proceed, albeit at a glacial pace. One of the reasons for the slow progress is guidelines such as this: “verse quotations should be centered on the longest line”.

Today, April 5th, is CSS Naked Day. This means that if you are reading this on the website and not via RSS, what you are seeing is Clagnut with the CSS stripped off.

There’s an different approach to web page layout which is gradually getting some traction. The idea is that the layout is changed to best accommodate the window size.

I’m really pleased to finally announce the release of a brand new website, The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web, or Web Typography for short.

24 ways to impress your friends – an advent calendar.

Since Firefox 1.5 shipped with a partial implementation of the proposed CSS 3 Multi-column layout module, it’s received a fair bit of attention…

Well it’s the usual reason – so much stuff, so little time. There’s two projects, two books and then my arch nemesis pops up.

The BritPack logo on these pages is an alpha-transparent PNG and I use a little PHP script to deliver browser-specific code to IE6 and IE5.5 and a normal image to other browsers.

Here’s something that’s been playing on my mind recently. What role can CSS alone play in making websites accessible?

Westciv, home of StyleMaster, have turned the content of their excellent CSS guide into what theyre calling a podGuide, so now you can read it on your iPod.

PPK has a new browser resource called Bug Report. Design Engaged looked to be hugely successful and fascinating (link to a terrific animation). Veen talks about the difficulty of ditching the PowerPoint mentality.

A simple CSS rule appeared recently on the Web Standards Group list, generating a fair bit of discussion.

Web Essentials is almost upon us and now it has a blog. On a vaguely related note, CSS Vault recently pointed to some demonstrations of CSS in scientific web publishing in particular rendering mathematical expressions.

[See my A List Apart article for more up-to-date info] Text for the screen is sized with CSS in terms of pixels, ems or keywords. Pixels is easy, keywords are well documented. That leaves ems. I will now attempt to show you how ems can be as quick and easy to use as pixels.

Mozilla’s DOM Inspector (also available in Firefox) can seem daunting at first but is amazingly powerful. Amongst other things, it allows you to see which CSS rules are affecting any given element in order of cascade priority.

My new iBook arrived just in time for the Easter break. This is not only the first time I’ve owned a Mac but also the first time I’ve used one for more than about a minute.

BBC Broadcast has just released a classy new site with valid XHTML and CSS underneath the hood. Check out the transparent sliding menus built on lists.

Another CSS crib sheet (on centering divs) from Andy Budd and a first A List Apart article (on creating a JavaScript image gallery) from Jeremy Keith.

Fixed versus liquid design is an emotive debate. Liquid layout seems more intuitive, appropriate and elegant but is not without issues. However many concerns can be addressed with little or no compromise.

I’ve been playing around with ways of displaying images in variable width columns, particularly with images that are wider than their container. Please cast your eye over my experiments.

Why and how Web designers should be using font-family in a more adventurous manner: there are some great typefaces out there – let’s use them. The Visibone survey is an invaluable aid in typeface selection.

Web designers are forever sticking curves in their designs, particularly when smoothing corners of boxes. Designers have good reasons for this, but those of us charged with building the reality find it a pain in the bum, usually having to resort to tables to quickly get the job…