CSS: More fun than it sounds

As many of you know I've been experimenting with webpage design in the last month or so, and for the last week or so I've been trying to learn CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, basically a way to change the looks of a webpage without changing its code). I've got most of the language down thanks to the easy interactive lessons at W3Schools, but yesterday I found an amazing website which I think explains why CSS is much more fun than it sounds called CSS Zengarden. Basically they have a base webpage which various graphic designers use to illustrate the extremes that can be made by using CSS ... "The code remains the same, the only thing that has changed is the external .css file. Yes, really."

Here are a few of my favorite examples of what can be done just by using CSS and not messing around with the (HTML) code of the page . . . the most exciting part is that I should actually be able to do this stuff!

• Amazingly Done Paper Effect
• Very Clean: Calligraphy and Misty Hills
• Very Clean: Lake
• Clean: Old Passport
• Well Done Constant Background Image: Cow
• Unique table backgrounds: Leaves on Water
• More table backgrounds
• Interesting Blur Effect
• Rubber Ducky
• Unique Paragraph Effect
• Cleanly Done Adjustable Tables

The Ten Commandments

Here is a link to George Carlin's take on the Ten Commandments. Makes sense to me.

Adobe CS2 is fun

I recently convinced my office to get me a copy of Adobe Creative Suite CS2 so that I can make more professional media for release; I had used my copies of Photoshop 5 and Illustrator CS1 to make some decent flyers and stuff which sealed the deal. But CS2 is new to me, and I'm trying out all the new options, and in particular one new feature in Illustrator called "live trace" which instantly turns pixel graphics into vector graphics. Vector graphics are better because they can be sized down and up ad infinatum without any pixelization or loss.

As an example, take this image of Flexo I found on the internet. Press a single button, and it changes it into a vector graphic. Then you are free to use "live paint" quickly and easily fill up the different spots with different colors. Never before has been using colors in Illustrator been this easy; now it a snap to show different possible color schemes. To the right are a few examples, click on it to get a better view.

The trick is going to be that I, or anyone actually, could make a quick pencil drawing of something that we want to be a graphic. All we have to do is scan it, run "live trace" and boom. It's a graphic that can be any resized, reshaped and quickly colored to a hundred different color schemes. It is so cool, it's unbelievable.