The Zen of CSS Design

Last updated
The Zen of CSS Design
The Zen of CSS Design-cover.jpeg
Author Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag
Subject CSS, Web design
Genre Non-fiction
PublisherPeachpit Press
Publication date
February 27, 2005
Pages304
ISBN 978-0-321-30347-9
OCLC 58393096

The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web is a book by web designers Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag, published in 2005.

Contents

Content

The book is based on 36 designs featured at the CSS Zen Garden resource, an online showcase of CSS-based design. The process that each designer took in coming up with the final design is examined in each case study. [1]

Reception

It was reviewed favorably by freelance Web designer Karen Morrill-McClure of Digital Web Magazine:

The perfect coffee table book for a Web designer—lots of pictures of Web pages and loads of good information. [2]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graphic design</span> Interdisciplinary branch of design and of the fine arts

Graphic design is a profession, academic discipline and applied art whose activity consists in projecting visual communications intended to transmit specific messages to social groups, with specific objectives. Graphic design is an interdisciplinary branch of design and of the fine arts. Its practice involves creativity, innovation and lateral thinking using manual or digital tools, where it is usual to use text and graphics to communicate visually.

Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design ; authoring, including standardised code and proprietary software; user experience design ; and search engine optimization. Often many individuals will work in teams covering different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all. The term "web design" is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end design of a website including writing markup. Web design partially overlaps web engineering in the broader scope of web development. Web designers are expected to have an awareness of usability and be up to date with web accessibility guidelines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeffrey Zeldman</span> American entrepreneur and web designer

Jeffrey Zeldman is an American entrepreneur, web designer, author, podcaster and speaker on web design. He is the co-founder of A List Apart Magazine and the Web Standards Project. He also founded the design studios Happy Cog and studio.zeldman, and co-founded the A Book Apart imprint and the design conference An Event Apart.

A web style sheet is a form of separation of content and presentation for web design in which the markup of a webpage contains the page's semantic content and structure, but does not define its visual layout (style). Instead, the style is defined in an external style sheet file using a style sheet language such as CSS or XSLT. This design approach is identified as a "separation" because it largely supersedes the antecedent methodology in which a page's markup defined both style and structure.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Molly Holzschlag</span> American computer scientist (1963–2023)

Molly E. Holzschlag was an American author, lecturer and advocate of the Open Web. She wrote or co-authored 35 books on web design and open standards, including The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web. She was nicknamed the "Fairy Godmother of the Web".

The CSS Zen Garden is a World Wide Web development resource "built to demonstrate what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design." It launched in May 2003.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dave Shea (web designer)</span>

Dave Shea is a Canadian web designer and co-author of The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web.

A List Apart is a webzine that explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.

A spacer GIF is a small, transparent GIF image that is used in web design and HTML coding. They were used to control the visual layout of HTML elements on a web page, at a time when the HTML standard alone did not allow this. They became mostly obsolete after the browser wars-fueled addition of layout attributes to HTML 2.0 table tags, and were mostly unused by the time Cascading Style Sheets became widely adopted.

A photographic album or photo album, is a series of photographic prints collected by an individual person or family in the form of a book. Some book-form photo albums have compartments which the photos may be slipped into; other albums have heavy paper with an abrasive surface covered with clear plastic sheets, on which surface photos can be put. Older style albums often were simply books of heavy paper on which photos could be glued to or attached to with adhesive corners or pages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Page layout</span> Part of graphic design that deals in the arrangement of visual elements on a page

In graphic design, page layout is the arrangement of visual elements on a page. It generally involves organizational principles of composition to achieve specific communication objectives.

Tableless web design is a web design method that avoids the use of HTML tables for page layout control purposes. Instead of HTML tables, style sheet languages such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to arrange elements and text on a web page.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Progressive enhancement</span> Web design strategy putting emphasis web content first

Progressive enhancement is a strategy in web design that puts emphasis on web content first, allowing everyone to access the basic content and functionality of a web page, whilst users with additional browser features or faster Internet access receive the enhanced version instead. This strategy speeds up loading and facilitates crawling by web search engines, as text on a page is loaded immediately through the HTML source code rather than having to wait for JavaScript to initiate and load the content subsequently, meaning content ready for consumption "out of the box" is served immediately, and not behind additional layers.

Steven Meisel is an American fashion photographer, who obtained popularity and critical acclaim with his work in Vogue and Vogue Italia as well as his photographs of friend Madonna in her 1992 book, Sex. He is now considered one of the most successful fashion photographers in the industry. He used to work regularly for both US and Italian Vogue, and W and now exclusively for British Vogue.

<i>E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial</i> in video games Video game series

Several video games and genres have been created as a result of the release of the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial based on the story and themes of the original game.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">EPUB</span> E-book file format

EPUB is an e-book file format that uses the ".epub" file extension. The term is short for electronic publication and is sometimes styled ePub. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smartphones, tablets, and computers. EPUB is a technical standard published by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). It became an official standard of the IDPF in September 2007, superseding the older Open eBook (OEB) standard.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CSS</span> Style sheet language

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML. CSS is a cornerstone technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and JavaScript.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Holy grail (web design)</span> CSS programming trick for dividing a web page into three columns

The holy grail is a web page layout which has multiple equal-height columns that are defined with style sheets. It is commonly desired and implemented, but for many years, the various ways in which it could be implemented with available technologies all had drawbacks. Because of this, finding an optimal implementation was likened to searching for the elusive Holy Grail.

ContentTools is an open-source WYSIWYG editor for HTML content written in JavaScript/CoffeeScript by Anthony Blackshaw of Getme Limited.

Cindy Sang-Ching Li was a web designer, author, and speaker known for her expertise in CSS, user experience, and accessibility. She was a member of the CSS Working Group created by the World Wide Web Consortium.

References

  1. Uhlir, Kurt (2023-04-10). "What is CSS: Cascading Style Sheet Explained for Beginners". Showcase IDX. Retrieved 2023-06-24.
  2. Morrill-McClure, Karen (2005-02-23). "Digital Web Magazine — The Zen of CSS Design". digital-web.com. Archived from the original on 19 February 2010. Retrieved 19 February 2010. The perfect coffee table book for a Web designer—lots of pictures of Web pages and loads of good information.