The CSS Trappist Monastery got a few more design submissions yesterday, along with a boat load (think Titanic, but hold the iceberg!) of traffic after it got blogged over at MetaFilter. To those who questioned the seriousness of the site in the comments there, yes, it’s completely serious. To those who commented on the crappy […]

Kenny Graham submitted the first design not created by me to the CSS Trappist Monastery. His design is titled Purity, for reasons you’ll understand from the comments at the top of his stylesheet. The first thing he does in the stylesheet is to override all the default CSS settings that a browser might apply to […]

Drop shadows can be a useful design element for adding depth and variety to your webpage designs, but tranditional techniques for adding drop shadows have required adding images to your pages, resulting in some slowing of download times. Here’s a technique for creating drop shadows using CSS which does not require images, and which allows […]

When starting out with CSS, you may be tempted to assign a class or two to every item on your page. Today’s tip will help you to accomplish the same amount of styling without overly littering your HTML with classes. The trick is to use descendant selectors.
Let’s say, for example, most of your page contains […]

You’ve learned HTML. You’ve built your website. It looks just fine. Why should you bother to learn CSS? Why should you overhaul your existing site to use CSS? More to the point, why should you spend time that you could be using doing other important things learning and implementing CSS? Is it really worth it? […]

No design blog would be complete without a reference to Dave Shea’s css Zen Garden. The CSS Zen Garden is an experiment in just how much the design of a website can be controlled with CSS. Shea created a webpage, and invited designers to submit stylesheets to alter its appearance. As of today, the site […]

You may be familiar with the css Zen Garden…or you may not. It’s a very cool experiment in the use of CSS in web design. Many designers have contributed many good, bad and ugly designs to it.
The other day, I had a mental arc–why not create a similar site with a slightly different focus. While […]