Category Archives: Graphics, Design and UI

An interesting technique

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Here’s an interesting technique of drawing a user’s eye to an area on a page, by using a colour that fades after a couple of seconds. I know that it’s supposed to be for areas updated by the user (and I can think of at least one project for doing this), but it might work else where. I must give this a go, see what it’s actually like. It’s going to either be really good, or really bad…

(Update – having migrated my blog to WordPress, I find that it uses this technique. And it’s quite nice. It works well)

Vertical Text in Internet Explorer

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Vertical Text

CSS seems to lack an real control over text direction – it should, but of course the reality is different.

What I found was a way of making vertical in IE using some of those pointless filters, and the support IE has for top to bottom, right to left languages. It’s a bit sneaky in doing this – but it works in IE, at least. I haven’t found a way of doing it in Mozilla.
<div style="{ writing-mode:tb-rl;
filter: flipv fliph;
white-space: nowrap;}">

Alpha channel PNGs in IE

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Gifs suck. PNGs (Portable Network Graphics) are much better – more colours, freedom from intellectual property rights, and (best of all) an alpha channel for transparency. Some good articles:

- PNG opacity (with some nice examples)

- Fuzzy Drop shadows (like on Google Maps)

- Transparency with HTC files

- And again

- Choosing what image to serve in PHP on the server

Related: Opacity in CSS, being able to see through DIVS – CSS Transparency for IE, CSS Opacity