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Speech bubbles are a popular effect but many tutorials rely on presentational HTML or JavaScript. This tutorial contains various forms of speech bubble effect created with CSS2.1 and enhanced with CSS3. No images, no JavaScript and it can be applied to your existing semantic HTML…

Last week I posted a CSS3 dropdown menu and someone complained that I didn’t explain the CSS code in detail. Well, here is a post on the basics of the new properties: text-shadow, box-shadow, and border-radius. These CSS3 properties are commonly used to enhance layout and good to know…

While playing around with css-transform to make various shapes, I saw a way to create animated image-less loading spinners such as used in a lot of webapps and of course on the iPhone…

WebKit browsers paved the way with CSS based gradients. Now Firefox 3.6 is out and is supporting them as well, which makes using them for progressive enhancement all the more appealing. More good news, CSS3 gradients fall into the camp where you can specify fallbacks (i.e. images) so that browsers that don’t support them just use the image instead.

But wait… if you need to use an image anyway, why bother with declaring the gradient with CSS? That is kind of how I felt for a long time, but there is one important aspect that makes it worth it: browsers that support them don’t load the image fallback. One less HTTP Request = all the faster your site will load…

Drop caps are a nice typographic detail that look great on many websites. There are a few ways of achieving this effect but the CSS selector I like to use is the :first-letter pseudo-element. This selector is reasonably well supported across most modern browsers albeit with a few minor bugs here and there. Here’s how it works…

There has been an increasing and sincere interest in typography on the web over the last few years. Most websites rely on text to convey their messages, so it’s not a surprise that text is treated with utmost care. In this article, we’ll look at some useful techniques and clever effects that use the power of style sheets and some features of the upcoming CSS Text Level 3 specification, which should give Web designers finer control over text…

A handy little tool that allows you to graphically generate the code for CSS round corners…

Thanks to advanced CSS properties, such as gradients and shadows, it’s now quite easy to turn a dull web form into something beautiful – with minimal effort. I’ll show you how in today’s tutorial…

A Mac-like multi-level dropdown menu that I’ve created using border-radius, box-shadow, and text-shadow. It renders perfect on Firefox, Safari and Chrome. The dropdown also works on non-CSS3 compitable browsers such as IE7+, but the rounded corners and shadow will not be rendered…

Even before CSS3 introduced a cornucopia of new border properties, CSS2.1 provided plenty of great functionality, enabling designers to style and enhance borders in many different ways. But now with the many new border properties available with CSS3, much more is possible, including everything from background border images, asymmetrical border radii, border transformations, custom fitting, and much more. While not every browser fully supports all of these new stylistic possibilities, we can practice progressive enhancement to create beautiful, well-styled borders for modern browsers while supporting the dinosaurs with suitable fallback styles…