CSS Text Shadows and Background Sizing

By admin

The Opera Deveoper Community published a recent article of mine about CSS3 properties text-shadow and background-size.

If both properties were implemented across mainstream browsers, I believe we would see a lot more visually engaging and bulletproof Web site designs. (Of course, the Spider-Man caveat still exists: with great power, comes great responsibility.) Here’s a snippet from the article:

CSS3 offers advancements in how Web designers can apply design touches to their designs. One of the most often wished for properties — text-shadow, which allows easy creation of drop shadowscode — looks to be popular as new versions of popular browsers are starting to support the property.

I will also look at background-size — this is a CSS property that will let Web designers set the backgrounds of elements so that the background images can stretch or fill the entire background image, if widely implemented.

Together both CSS properties can add unique twists to everyday Web design with minimal effort. In this article I will explore both of these, showing how they work with some simple examples. Read More

Design a Way to Las Vegas

By admin

What stays in Vegas stays in Vegas, but what about what you do to get there?

Starting on March 5th through the 7th, Microsoft is once again hosting the MIX Conference in the The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino. Keynote presentations from Steve Ballmer, Scott Guthrie, and Guy Kawasaki (who apparently worked for Apple at one point in time). 

Full registration runs at $1,295 and that doesn’t include the cost of the hotel and travel expenses. 

If you can’t afford that or would like to curb some of the cost for attending, try your hand at the ReStyle MIX08 Contest.

ReStyle logo

If you win by creating one of the top three designs and you will receive paid registration to the conference, three nights at the Venetian hotel and $1000 towards your travel expenses. That’s a total of $3,000 in winnings. Not too bad if you know your way around Photoshop and CSS.

The catch, though, is that you don’t have much time left. Redesign submissions will be accepted up to midnight (Pacific Time) on February 7th, 2008. For more complete rules, check out the official Web site.

Just a little bit of disclosure. I’m on the judging panel along with Molly Holzschlag and Donavon West.