CSS Head

CSS Media Queries are part of CSS3 and in brief: they allow you to tailor your websites appearance for different screen sizes. Most people I speak to know about media queries but have been a little shy in trying them out. You can read about media queries elsewhere – here, I’d like to speak about a first-hand experience of using them…

Centring block level elements is easy, just define a width and set margin:0 auto;, but what if you don’t know that fixed width? You could use text-align:center;, but that won’t work on 100%-width block-level elements either… that’ll only work on text-level elements.

This article demonstrates how to create full width "browser-like" tabs using pure CSS3 and some HTML5 markup. This article includes whole lot of new CSS properties such as box and text shadows, border radius and CSS gradients…

When it comes to type rendering on the web, there’s not much web designers can do. The way fonts appear on screen is mostly due to operating systems, browsers, typeface designs, font files, and how those font files are (or are not) augmented with instructions for the most unforgiving rendering scenarios. But in some cases, CSS properties can affect how type looks…

Emulating background image crop, background image opacity, background transforms, and improved background positioning. A few hacks relying on CSS pseudo-elements to emulate features unavailable or not yet widely supported by modern browsers…

High-quality interface elements are a great way to add that extra bit of refinement to a website. I’ve been maintaining a repo of CSS3 buttons for the past few months and I’m starting to see them slowly make their way out into the real world. This tutorial is going to give you a deeper understanding of the design thinking that goes into making these buttons and show you how to make them from scratch…

You’re probably familiar with CSS3 gradients by now, including the closer to the standard Mozilla syntax and the ugly verbose Webkit one. I assume you know how to add multiple color stops, make your gradients angled or create radial gradients. What you might not be aware of, is that CSS3 gradients can be used to create many kinds of commonly needed patterns, including checkered patterns, stripes and more…

Here’s a CSS3 animation property that you might not know about. The -webkit-animation-fill-mode property. It provides fine-tuned control over your CSS3 keyframe animations…

The default viewport settings – the size and scale of the viewport – in Mobile Safari/Safari for iOS are optimised for websites with a width of 980 pixels. This means that if you use a fluid/elastic layout or media queries to make your layout adaptable, Safari on iOS doesn’t take advantage of the flexibility that offers but shows the site zoomed out as if it had a fixed width. Another issue with Safari on iOS is how text size is handled when you change orientation from portrait to landscape on your iPhone/iPod/iPad. The default behaviour is to increase text size instead of using the extra available width to display more of the site. As a developer you can affect both of these issues or features if you prefer to call them that…

An in depth article covering CSS3 gradients. The smartly applied gradient can be a valuable contributor to a designer’s vocabulary. Let’s take a quick look at how to create CSS gradients—hopefully we can make them seem a bit more accessible, and bring a bit more art into the browser…