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I'm diving into CSS and would like to practice coding from PSDs. Any sites where I can grab free designs in PSD format?
Or any other suggestions for practicing?
Take a
screen shot of a website you think
would be challenging, slice and dice
any images needed yourself in
Photoshop and then re-create it via
HTML/CSS. Of course most websites are
under copyright and you could not use
any of their intellectual property
(e.g. images, design, code, etc...)
in any public manner.
Practice/improve
your CSS skills on the CSS Zen
Garden. The site
was created in such as way that
developers can dramatically change
it's presentation purely with CSS.
Look through the designs and see how
that developer accomplished it. After
you are done with your own design you
can submit it to be shared.
See if you can find a sample/demo template from one of the many template retailers on the web. Discard their HTML/CSS and recreate yourself.
You may need some "filler" content to make your design more realistic. You might try a lorem ipsum generator.
I may be not really helpful, but I truly remember myself struggling with no production experience.
And, as I did, the best way to get it, was to give free of charge services of html/css coding.
as long as you're not publishing the designs as your own, copying for the purposes of education is protected as "fair-use".
Copy Copy Copy
Practice re-creating everything. Read through the stylesheets of sites you like, and take notes on what elements are present in them.
Don't limit yourself to just sites like what you are planning on creating, copy completely unrelated pages too. There are many companies that will publish images of designs: copy those too.
When you've crated a clone page, start tweaking styles. Add a border here, tweak some margins there. The more you play with it, the more you'll understand it.
Also: read through the CSS specifications:
CSS1
CSS2
CSS3
And make sure you've got a good grasp of HTML by reading the html specs too.
It can be slow. It may be boring. It will be worth it.
Related
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We're considering a new CMS for our huge 10-20,000 page site. We are not currently using any CMS, but have individual html pages with the content embedded(!).
Our site is mostly 'regular' content types, with a few discussion boards and some document handling. We also have a number of news sections/blogs and some profile directories.
We have few developers with limited coding skills and even fewer coders on the team. We've considered WordPress (which we're already using for a few sites) and also CraftCMS. CraftCMS seems more fitting to our needs because it's flexible and lean; we're impressed with what we've seen so far but are concerned that it's not open-source and that it's so new. WordPress seems cumbersome to the coding developers as much of the system is 'out of the box' and requires loading lots of plugins and things that you don't 'need' for a page.
Are there other similar CMSs that people can recommend for us to consider? Please don't tell me about your favorite CMS; please DO tell me about a CMS that you know of that may fit our needs. Comments on the CMSs mentioned above in the context of our needs are welcomed as well.
Thank you.
CraftCMS is as impressive as it looks, I've built 4 sites so far with it and the more I use it the more I discover thoughtful little details that make development easier. This is particularly true for content rich sites with lots of variables & different article types.
Compared to Wordpress and other similar systems I have used, you will be amazed at how few plugins are required even for complex layouts & implementations.
The newness concern is totally valid too. I waited for almost 3 years before doing any client work for that very reason. Wanted to see if a stable dev community would develop around it and to be sure that it would be financially viable for the developers. The creator recent addressed this issue and open source concerns on Hacker News here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12009552
ExpressionEngine 2 was always the choice for bigger, more robust sites. But when CraftCMS burst into the scene we felt it addressed some of ExpressionEngine's shortcomings. We we waited until Craft 2.0 to switch. Here a few reasons why:
TWIG templates: believe me, you want your templates to be as modular, and as clean, as possible. Twig is incredible powerful and it has great documentation.
Matrix Field: If you not used to, it takes a while to wrap your head around the concept of "Content Blocks". But once you do, tackling complex content is a breeze.
Great community: I know Wordpress has a giant community, but that is actually bad IMO. Of course you want the community to be big, but once it gets to size, it can be hard to know who to ask for help. Craft community is in that sweet spot where you can find (good) help pretty fast. I also find that projects that have a person/company behind the product are great on raining in community issues.
First Party E-Commerce support: about a third of the projects we work on it has some kind of commerce in it. Not having to rely on third-party plugins is refreshing.
We've also checked other offerings, such as Statamic, ExpressionEngine 3, and even some Node based CMS's. But Craft really does mostly a better job then the others.
I hope it helps!
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I would really like to learn how to use Twitter Bootstrap 3. The problem is that it seems I can't find a good source to learn it from. Any source I've tried so far assumed that you somehow have some knowledge and wasn't explaining what are the available classes for elements, what are the classes they have used are actually doing etc.
I simply want a source it can either be a book/videos or w/e that will start from scratch and if possible, will use HTML5, modernizr and respond.js to make it cross-browser supported and actually give me a start point (base folder just like H5BP) which I can then later on start building my own websites.
Thanks in advance!
The bootstrap docs are really helpful, probably the best resource.
http://getbootstrap.com/getting-started/
http://getbootstrap.com/components
My first recommendation is to learn CSS in depth. Oftentimes, Bootstrap is just not necessary, but developers rely on it because they are too lazy to master CSS fundamentals. You are welcome to check my book series - Functional CSS - which covers almost the entirety of CSS using practical examples.
If you are keen on sticking with Bootstrap, then you can 1) print the source code for their example (Bootstrap examples) and simply re-implement them on your own, typing each block of code one line at a time and observing the effect, and 2) read the Bootstrap source code. The latter is a bit over 6000 lines and should not take long to go through. And, 3) reflecting on what you have learned in 1 and 2, create personal realistic website that uses Bootstrap.
If you are looking for a good source here is one: http://ieatcss.com/twitter-bootstrap-tutorial.html
3 Step by step real time examples are used in Ieatcss bootstrap 3 tutorial. You can easily understand them without any knowledge of the basics.
Don't worry about learning CSS & other messy things. The tutorials in http://ieatcss.com is targeted at complete beginners, you can easily understand them.
Regards,
Hussain.
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For a few days now i am looking for a webdesigners who can make my page look nice. All i can find is people that are making .psd files of websites so i can cut out elements and put them on my page. I don't need that. I want someone, who will visit my page, look through my .css file, remake it, and maybe add few graphic elements on site - like logo and/or some icons.
I would do it by myself, but i am very bad at selecting/coupling colors, so i need someone to do it for me.
So, reasuming: how do i search through google to actually find people that can make my page look good by remaking my .css files?
People still go by the umbrella term Web Designers : http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HireAndPayADesignerAndBeHappy.aspx
I generally search css web designers to narrow it down.
Altho this area may seem gray there are a few professionals involved on different aspects of what you want.
The reason behind the confusion is that the same professional might occupy more than one role.
A Web Designer should be be able to do that. And it is required of one the basic knowledge of CSS/HTML alongside with your description.
A Web Ui Engenier is the specialist on CSS/HTML/JavaScript he wont design the interface per say He is the guy who implements it.
And a Web UX Designer is the person who will design the user interface and experience. How it should behave and the UI engenier will implement it.
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I'm looking for automated tools to help me refactor a bunch of CSS files, for example:
Remove unnecessary selectors (e.g. not used inside the page)
detect repeatable rules inside several selectors and suggest a merge
Are there any such tools?
Thanks!
Yes Google Page Speed does this CSS investigation. Link:
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/overview.html
not totally automated, but this one works well.
I like the fact that I can see what I'm changing. While I've done UI for 15 years, there's always little things that I notice myself repeating via using this tool. In the long run, doing things a bit manually is going to make me a better developer.
Doing one that looks for unnecessary selectors is a dangerous game. You could do it, but if you ever find yourself doing dynamic and/or ajax injected divs, you'll immediately blow up your page or app using an automated tool. If you do it, make sure it's not something that works on the fly, without some sort of very good testing environment to verify the resulting output. My current corporate clients would never allow me to use any sort of point-of-request tool based on their requirements of 100% tested and verified CSS.
This tool can do automatic css refactoring, though its value in project still need to evaluate carefully.
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Examples might include:
buttons (class="button" or similar)
rounded boxes with headings (class="content-box" or similar)
nice looking html tables (class="nice-table" or similar)
customised html form fields
[example class names just to give an idea of expected behaviour]
Basically I just want some readymade CSS for common things.
My non-designer friend wants to get started creating a web app and I feel that ready made simple but attractive CSS classes would be a great help.
Try this ones:
http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/ — css framework from creators of twitter, have wide range of common elements.
http://foundation.zurb.com/ — another framework with hight focus on prototyping.
There is Skeleton: http://getskeleton.com. It has both JS and CSS patterns and is helpful for developing sites quickly, it's also mobile friendly.
jQuery UI provides a nice framework for this, even if you don't use the javascript side of things. You can reuse their CSS for whatever you need. See here:
http://jqueryui.com/docs/Theming/API
http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/
YUI3. Yahoo! has created some of the best rules for web development.
Reset - level all browsers
Fonts - level all fonts
Base - reapply some common styles
Grids - best way to manage grid-like layouts
http://yuilibrary.com/yui/css/