Articles by: chriscoyier
Eight Original “Advertise Here” 125×125 Graphics
July 22, 2008 by chriscoyier
One of the most popular formats for online advertisements, especially amongst blogs, is the 125px by 125px square ad. Who knows why. Perhaps the size makes it easy to use in both narrow sidebars in a single column and wider sidebars as well in two columns. Whatever the reason, it’s popularity is nice for both designers as well as advertisers. Designers because we can design around this block size when creating new designs. Advertisers because having a unified size means having to create less... [Continue reading this tutorial]
Create an Attractive Illustrated Table of Contents for the Web
July 14, 2008 by chriscoyier
Longer articles/content on the web are well served by a Table of Contents. Like in a book, they increase usability by allowing readers to jump directly to specific sections, rather than laboriously scroll the entire article to find something. A typical Table of Contents rather boring, let’s spice it up a little bit with a little color and illustration! Here is what we will build: [Continue reading this tutorial] Read More →
Designing Your Page Around a jQuery UI Theme
July 7, 2008 by chriscoyier
The release of jQuery UI 1.5 brought with it the Themeroller, which is a quick and easy way to customize and download a set of jQuery “widgets” for use on a web page. Simply choose from one of the pre-built themes, or adjust the settings to your own liking and download the theme. Your download will include all the files necessary to for all these widgets to work, and a demo file with all of them on one page. In fact, these pre-built theme could serve you well as a starting point for... [Continue reading this tutorial]
Web Tip: Creating a Reusable “Button” Class
June 30, 2008 by chriscoyier
Web pages are full of buttons. Navigation, links, “next” buttons, “submit” buttons, “OK” buttons, “close” buttons… the list goes on. When you go about designing a new web page, chances are its going to have a lot of buttons. Make life easier for yourself by creating a button class that you can reuse over and over in your HTML whenever you need a button. Not only is this a favor to you, but it’s good for your users and aesthetics as well.... [Continue reading this tutorial]
Easy Automatic Color Manipulation in Illustrator
June 23, 2008 by chriscoyier
Adobe Illustrator has some cool and powerful tools for manipulating the colors in your document. Using these tools, you can achieve some very nice colorization’s even if you aren’t particularly good at choosing colors. It also becomes easier to try out different versions quickly! [Continue reading this tutorial] Read More →
Preparing an Illustration for the Web
June 16, 2008 by chriscoyier
Illustration is a lovely trend in web design. It fits the medium well. Great Illustrators though, often don’t think in terms of the web when they do their illustrations. Take a look at this very nice sky/hill cityscape illustration I found on shutterstock: I think this illustration would make a great base for a web design, but clearly it isn’t prepared for such a task out-of-the-box. Lets do some manipulation and prepare it the web. [Continue reading this tutorial] Read More →
