I have just discovered the tools section of the Smashing Magazine with very interesting articles like these ones:
And there are many more!
Case: Build a dynamic template from a PSD file including graphical text headlines and navigation. The PSD was originally built on Mac containing Mac Type 1 fonts, which I could not use on my Windows machine to edit the text in the layout. After a bit of searching I found a tool to do the conversion into TTF/OTF:
FrossFont: http://www.asy.com/sharecf.htm
It is a funny situation when you have customers that see an app that you made for them differently than you see it. Usually I use Multiple IEs to make sure my layout gets displayed as intended also in the MS browsers. To my surprise Multiple IEs did not display the ‘peekaboo bug’ in its IE6 emulation.
‘Peekaboo’ in short: When using floats IE6 hides text when the page is loaded. You can only see it when you mark it with you mouse or resize the window in the correct way…
You can find lots of good much more detailed explanations:
http://www.google.de/search?q=%22peekaboo+bug%22
Best workaround I found:
Add a line-height like this style=”line-height: 1em;” to the enclosing <div/> containing the problem.
I came accross a nice blog with lots of cool links to layout related things. Start at
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/07/17/exploring-design-outstanding-start-pages/
and also visit links like ‘50 Beautiful CSS-Based Web-Designs’ etc. in the category section.
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To research for layouts, there is also a very good book series: The ‘Web Design Index’ comes out once a year. It is essentially website-designs ordered by color. Very interesting to see the evolution over the years.
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