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The Road to Enlightenment

Littering a dark and dreary road lay the past relics of browser-specific tags, incompatible DOMs, and broken CSS support.

Today, we must clear the mind of past practices. Web enlightenment has been achieved thanks to the tireless efforts of folk like the W3C, WaSP and the major browser creators.

The css Zen Garden invites you to relax and meditate on the important lessons of the masters. Begin to see with clarity. Learn to use the (yet to be) time-honored techniques in new and invigorating fashion. Become one with the web.
So What is This About?

There is clearly a need for CSS to be taken seriously by graphic artists. The Zen Garden aims to excite, inspire, and encourage participation. To begin, view some of the existing designs in the list. Clicking on any one will load the style sheet into this very page. The code remains the same, the only thing that has changed is the external .css file. Yes, really.

CSS allows complete and total control over the style of a hypertext document. The only way this can be illustrated in a way that gets people excited is by demonstrating what it can truly be, once the reins are placed in the hands of those able to create beauty from structure. To date, most examples of neat tricks and hacks have been demonstrated by structurists and coders. Designers have yet to make their mark. This needs to change.
Participation

Graphic artists only please. You are modifying this page, so strong CSS skills are necessary, but the example files are commented well enough that even CSS novices can use them as starting points. Please see the CSS Resource Guide for advanced tutorials and tips on working with CSS.

You may modify the style sheet in any way you wish, but not the HTML. This may seem daunting at first if you’ve n

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css webdesign design web inspiration html reference tutorial

03 Jun 09

Reputation Parent - Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

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reputation patterns social community design web participation yahoo

20 May 09

subways at scale

www.fakeisthenewreal.org/subway - Preview

illustration maps transportation travel subway design map visualization swarna d dnld

19 May 09

Spoonflower: Print custom fabric on-demand

www.spoonflower.com/welcome - Preview

fabric printing crafts spoonflower design sewing

24 Apr 09

Computers Are the Balanchine Behind Those Dancing Fountains - The New York Times

''Technology is just as important to a fountain as steel is to a building,'' said Mark Fuller, chairman and founder of Wet Design, a company based in Universal City, Calif., that designed Bellagio's fountain.

www.nytimes.com/...d-those-dancing-fountains.html - Preview

LFLV2 wet design

Considered to be among the largest and most sophisticated in the world, it opened at a cost of $40 million. It has 1,203 nozzles and 4,500 lights spread across 860 feet of an eight-acre faux Alpine lake.
It spews flames while it sprays water, creating what looks like burning water. Natural gas is released into the water and then lighted -- but only after the maintenance system's approval and only if the fountain's human operator is pressing an all-clear button at the proper moment.
2 more annotations...
- Even without fire, choreographing Bellagio's fountain took more than two months. The performance of each nozzle and light had to be individually programmed for the duration of nearly a dozen songs.
  
  ''To do it the traditional way of turning knobs and typing things in would take the proverbial thousand monkeys a thousand years,'' said Mr. Fuller, from Wet Design.
  
  The fountain's brains are in a couple of unremarkable looking boxes filled with electronics that sit in eight-foot-tall glass cabinets in a tower behind the lake. Called spoolers, these devices are actually special computers that can quickly issue a large number of commands.
- On an autumn evening, Scott O'Connor operated the fountain at Bellagio. He pressed the fountain's green start button, and within seconds water salvos were jumping nearly 200 feet in the air to the rhythm of Frank Sinatra singing ''Luck Be a Lady.'' When he saw through binoculars that the spray was drenching the restaurant, he told the computer to reduce the fountain's height.
  
  ''This is the most violent, most impressive show we have,'' Mr. O'Connor said before looking through his binoculars for angry faces on the restaurant patio. A bit relieved, he added, ''No one's jumping.''

12 Apr 09

Main Page - Social Patterns

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wiki design patterns ui socialmedia social usability webdesign print

The Designing Social Interfaces patterns wiki is a companion site to the book that Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone are currently writing for O'Reilly Media.
We decided to share the patterns as we write the patterns and the book to get community feedback. We think that hearing a variety of opinions about these topics will make the material stronger and more representative of what's happening in social interfaces. As we complete sections of the book, we will be adding the patterns.
If you choose to contribute, we ask that you don't delete sections out right, but rather add your information with attribution. We want to incorporate contributions into the final book material and would like to know who contributed what. Every page has a discussion tab for conversations about the topic.
We look forward to talking with you!

10 Apr 09

A design and usability blog: Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)

Patterns is now a book Jason Apr 09
Post a comment

A few months ago I posted about Patterns. Patterns is a great example of smart self promotion by R.BIRD, a package design agency out of New York.

They recently stepped it up a notch by turning their free Patterns reports into a book. You can now buy a 220-page full-color paperback or a PDF on their site. You can also purchase individual reports too

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usability design web2.0 rails

06 Apr 09

A Designer Who Takes Things Personally - NYTimes.com

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design

“What interests me is the relationship between objects and people, and what triggers it,” she said. “I often find clues by looking in friends’ cupboards to find out what’s there. Then I ask them what makes this cup better than that one? How do they use it? How long have they kept it, and why?”
It’s my way of being sustainable,” she explained. “If you create products that have real meaning for people, they’re likely to last longer because they’ll want to keep them.”
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- One of her favorite tactics is to use decoration as a benign way of tricking people into associating her objects with the intimacy of hand-craftsmanship, even if they were produced in tens of thousands of units for IKEA. In her latest project, which is to be unveiled in an exhibition opening Saturday at Galerie Kreo in Paris, she has made three-dimensional versions of decorative patterns. One table takes the shape of a turtle in an explosion of multicolored resin and wood. Another sports a frog carved from the same wood as the top. “Decoration is a great way of triggering the imagination, and of making you think that an object really is yours,” she said.
- When she started designing furniture for Vitra, Ms. Jongerius had to find a way of making identical products look like one-offs, too. She designed the Polder Sofa as an optical illusion of an old sofa with cushions in subtly different colors and shapes, dangling cotton threads and mismatched buttons. It is impeccably engineered in Vitra’s state-of-the-art factories, yet we feel as fondly toward it as we would a shabby old sofa.
- The Polder has been a hit for Vitra, and Ms. Jongerius deployed a similar strategy for the Worker Chair. Having spent the last year revising all of Vitra’s colors and fabrics, she is now experimenting with new approaches to “individualization” in office furniture.

04 Apr 09

Custom T-Shirts - Design Custom T-Shirts Online - T-Shirt Screen Printing

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t-shirt design shopping printing custom business LFLV

28 Mar 09

Cooper-Hewitt Video: Bringing Graphic Design to the Classroom: Workshop with Ellen Lupton

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cooperhewitt graphic design classroom

21 Mar 09

Flickr Clock

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flickr clock design photography clocks

20 Mar 09

Flip Video: Wrong, Wrong, Wrong And Then So, So Right.

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flip print discuss business design swarna

19 Feb 09

The New Look on a Smaller Scale - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/...20090219_AGING.html - Preview

universal design

18 Feb 09

Ben Blank, Innovator of Graphics for TV News, Dies at 87 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/...18blank.html - Preview

graphics design UI

Mr. Blank once recalled that the NASA mission to the Moon was a wellspring of news-graphics creativity. What he called animations were elaborate fake spaceships and real actors on tethers simulating astronauts in zero gravity. Because of this and other studio mockups, he was once asked by the broadcast journalist John Hockenberry in a 1996 I.D. magazine article about the tabloid claims that the space program was just a hoax filmed on a movie lot.
Mr. Blank answered: “You know, we could have done it all with graphics. All they had to do was ask.”
Mr. Blank once recalled that the NASA mission to the Moon was a wellspring of news-graphics creativity. What he called animations were elaborate fake spaceships and real actors on tethers simulating astronauts in zero gravity. Because of this and other studio mockups, he was once asked by the broadcast journalist John Hockenberry in a 1996 I.D. magazine article about the tabloid claims that the space program was just a hoax filmed on a movie lot.
Mr. Blank answered: “You know, we could have done it all with graphics. All they had to do was ask.”
1 more annotations...
- Mr. Blank once recalled that the NASA mission to the Moon was a wellspring of news-graphics creativity. What he called animations were elaborate fake spaceships and real actors on tethers simulating astronauts in zero gravity. Because of this and other studio mockups, he was once asked by the broadcast journalist John Hockenberry in a 1996 I.D. magazine article about the tabloid claims that the space program was just a hoax filmed on a movie lot.
  Mr. Blank answered: “You know, we could have done it all with graphics. All they had to do was ask.”