Archive for the ‘Design’ Category
This is the problem I witnesed with a colleague at office and now today it happened with me. I opened a webpage in dreamweaver and the CSS styles were not showing up. All the webpage was naked and colorless in design mode. I wondered. I doubled checked the CSS styles in head section. the script was there.
Searching over google did not help me as there was other issues about CSS and not this one. Then I kept looking in software options and did some settings and I got my visuals back after some minutes.
Here are the steps to solve the problem.
In dreamweaver Go to View - Visual Aids
Following options must be checked
- CSS Layout Box Model
- CSS Layout Outlines
Moreover Go to View - Styles Rendering
Make sure that following option is checked
- Screen Media Type
Interesting fact is this; even these option were checked with me but still CSS Styles were not displaying.
I figured out that I was using CSS Styles Script in another page header.php and so it was outside the webpage which I was editing but header was included in that page.
Here I did something more…
I defined site. Go to Site - Manage Sites
Define the site there, give it a name, give path where the pages are located and configure other options.
When site was defined then dreamweaver got it that where are rest of the pages and CSS was back and my page was again colorful in design mode.
Try this.
There is a pretty excellent service which take care about HTML, XHTML, CSS which you produce and they certify these to be validated or not. You know what I am talking about? Of course I am talking about W3C. They save us by helping us conclude that whether the code is validated or not!
And the validated code recommended by W3C is acceptable for everyone. End of story.
Where as Designers face different challenge. They create a design to which some people will comment that “wow, what a beautiful design! What a color combination! What a brilliant approach! What a thoughtful design balance and flow. But, some people will not agree with the comments about the same design.
So I wonder that whether there is a design validating service for us on this global village or not? Which will save the designers from this contradicting behavior of people’s approach towards colors?
Design page curves in Adobe Photoshop by yourself. You can do it by many ways. I will describe here two easy ways to do it.
Method 1.
Draw a box shape using pen tool. Clicking p will select pen tool in photoshop.
Now you can add editing points to it because its not a regular shape but its editable.
Add points by Add anchor point tool beneath to pen tool in its sub menu, at the corner where you want to curve to appear (e.g. slightly near from top right corner and slightly near right side under top right corner).
Select top right corner by Direct selection tool and drag it inwards.
Add gradients at that corner. Two gradients I suggest. One darker one at top and lighter one, beneath dark gradient by Gradient tool. You are done.
Download psd example file and see how I have made it.
Download Psd File (Curve1)
Method 2.
Draw a box shape using pen tool or by rectangle tool.
At right corner as in my case place a white little rectangle so that it covers a part of right corner exactly. I have used polygonal lasso tool to select further triangle from that small box. Now I had white background. I placed white box at corner of blue box. I created inward selection of triangle from that box and gave it dark blue color. That curved triangle piece which you can see in image below was that selected triangle. After giving it some shadows and applying some layer modes and gradients you can get exactly the same result as shown below.
Download psd of this example to see how I have done it.
Download Psd File (Curve2)
Share more techniques of creating fancy page curves with me.
The design and interface problems cited above will be familiar to every corporate or enterprise Webmaster and to anyone who has had to sit on a Web or intranet committee. The human and technical difficulties are all great reasons for doing nothing, but they ignore the most important element of any Web site: the user. If reasonable, consistent design standards are not adopted, the average user suffers confusion, reduced productivity, and lost opportunity to benefit from the promise of Web information sources. The advantages of consistent graphic design and user interface standards are immediately obvious in a user-centered approach to Web design and clearly transcend the parochial interests of participating departments, groups, and individuals. If the typical user of a public site or corporate intranet sees more confusion than useful information, no one will benefit.
Without clear design standards, your overall enterprise Web presence will evolve as a patchy, confusing set of pages — some well designed, some disastrous, and all mere parts of a dysfunctional system. A lack of design standards also limits Web use by imposing complex design decisions on new users who would like to develop sites; it’s a daunting task to have to develop new graphic design and interface conventions instead of being able to adopt a professionally designed system of corporate intranet standards.
