John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged design · everything

Super Stripes

This piece describes a practical web design technique for creating reusable stripe patterns using small transparent GIF images layered over different background colors in CSS. By preparing a few basic GIF files with alternating transparent and solid pixels, designers can quickly generate varied striped backgrounds across a website by simply changing the background-color property rather than creating new images for each color variation. The author suggests using this approach to visually distinguish different sections of a website while maintaining a cohesive design theme.

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A List Apart: Articles: Prettier Accessible Forms

This article presents a reusable CSS and JavaScript technique for styling accessible HTML forms with labels and inputs arranged horizontally side-by-side, using semantic markup (fieldset, legend, label elements) and an ordered list structure rather than tables. The solution relies on the CSS `display: inline-block` property for labels, supplemented by a JavaScript workaround for Mozilla browsers that don't natively support inline-block, while also addressing specific rendering quirks in Internet Explorer versions. The approach is designed to be portable across projects—authors can simply apply the "cmxform" class to any properly marked-up form to achieve basic structural styling that can be further customized without modifying the core reusable stylesheet.

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Image * After

Free high resolution images and textures for commercial and personal use. Daily additions. Free hi-res stock photography, with abstract graphics search.

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A List Apart: Articles: CSS Design: Going to Print

Eric Meyer explains how to create effective print style sheets using CSS instead of maintaining separate printer-friendly versions of web documents. He walks through the specific CSS fixes applied to A List Apart, including working around a Gecko browser bug with floated elements, adjusting backgrounds and font sizes for print, styling hyperlinks to display their URLs, and extending the masthead design across the page width. The approach eliminates version skew between web and print versions while requiring only a single well-structured HTML document and media-specific CSS rules.

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U-L-T-R-A'S Giant Color Chart

This is a landing page for a free online countdown timer tool that supports custom durations spanning days, hours, minutes, and seconds. The tool is designed for productivity applications like Pomodoro work sessions, cooking, fitness training, event planning, and studying, with features including a visual progress bar, optional alarm sound, and pause/resume functionality. The page emphasizes that the timer runs entirely in-browser without requiring downloads or subscriptions, making it more flexible than smartphone timers or basic web tools.

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Garrett Dimon / The Time is Now for Front-End Architects

Front-end development has become sufficiently complex—spanning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, accessibility, usability, and integration with backend systems—that most teams need a dedicated front-end architect rather than leaving these concerns to either backend engineers or markup-only developers. The author argues that current enterprise frameworks like ASP.Net and Websphere demonstrate the consequences of treating frontend technologies as an afterthought, producing substandard markup and failing to separate concerns properly. True front-end architects must understand both client-side and backend technologies well enough to make informed decisions about implementation approaches and communicate effectively with engineers across the stack.

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Juicy Studio: Example Luminosity Contrast Ratios

This reference page presents luminosity contrast ratios for all web-safe colors displayed against a black (#000) background, helping designers verify whether color combinations meet WCAG accessibility standards for readability. The table includes not only the contrast ratio for each foreground color but also brightness and hue differences, with icons indicating whether each combination passes AA or AAA accessibility levels for regular or large text. The highest contrast ratios occur with bright colors like white, cyan, and yellow (reaching 21.00 for white text on black), while dark colors like #003 produce minimal contrast and fail accessibility requirements.

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Wink

This is marketing material for Wink, a smart home hub platform that consolidates control of devices from multiple brands (Nest, GE, Philips, Honeywell) into a single app. The service offers automation features called "Robots" that let different devices trigger each other (like unlocking a door triggering lights to turn on) and "Shortcuts" for controlling multiple devices simultaneously. Wink's main pitch is simplifying the fragmented smart home landscape by allowing different manufacturers' products to communicate and work together through one interface.

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Heckling Adaptive Path - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)

Adaptive Path distinguishes between "Foundation Attributes" (technologies like user-generated content and real-time data that emerged in the mid-1990s but weren't sufficient on their own) and "Experience Attributes" (newer elements that create compelling user experiences), arguing that Web 2.0's real competitive advantage comes from combining both types. The piece suggests that Experience Attributes—which blur traditional lines between suppliers, vendors, and customers—are what actually drive the fast growth and innovation associated with Web 2.0 companies, rather than any single technical feature.

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Khmerang.com - CSS-Technique: Worn Type

This tutorial explains a CSS technique for creating a worn, distressed text effect in headers by overlaying a semi-transparent pattern image on top of text using an absolutely positioned span element. The method relies on floating the header to contain its width to the text itself, setting overflow to hidden to clip the pattern image, and creating a random-pixel GIF with transparency that obscures portions of the underlying text. While the technique effectively produces the visual effect and can be applied to various pattern types, it has the limitation that text cannot be selected normally due to the image overlay blocking mouse events.

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