A2 Codesigner

Even though we all know the sluggish pace of the W3C and the cross browser compatitibility issues, web sites all over are starting to use these new styling properties. Majority of the ones being used are the cool ones and are of course propietary using the -moz for Firefox and -webkit for Safari properties. Luckily the presentation gracefully degrades with inferior browsers. Properties such as rounded corners border-radius:,  text-shadow:, border-image:, and box-shadow are becoming very popular.

It will still be a few years before we can all adopt some of the more useful CSS3 properties and functionality such as column: for sturdy multi-column layouts. Clearing floats and positioning issues will be a thing of the past. Media queries which allow you to pass different style sheets based on the browsers screen size. Extremely useful for growing number of mobile internet users as well as users with large monitors at higher resolutions.

There are already some great resources available if you feel like using some CSS3 on your new websites or start practicing for future reference.

CSS3 Introduction. A great article by Design Shack introducing the basics of of CSS3.

CSS3.info. One stop shop for everything about CSS3. A list of all the properties, examples, browser compatibility, and selector test for your browser.

CSS3 Cheat Sheet. PDF (123K) created by Smashing Magazine.

Of course the W3C has their working draft on the CSS3 specs but as usual it’s cryptic and isn’t to useful. So have some fun writing invalid code for the future.

1.Kuler
Kuler is filled with great color schemes. Users can browse through a variety of quality color schemes as well as create their own schemes to save and share with other designers. The only draw back is having to update your flash player all the time. It’s always good practice to see your color schemes on the web before you start designing away in Photoshop due to the mysterious color shift.

2.Search Free Fonts
This is best place to find free fonts on the web. Search Free Fonts has whopping 13,000 you can download. You can even type in the words you are using to see the font in a live preview as well as an alphabetical listing of each font character.

3.Brusheezy
Updated daily this site offers the most popular Photoshop brushes around. Users can upload and download custom brushes as well as vote for the top brushes on the site. They have brushes in a variety of categories such as smoke, grunge, nature, spatter, and much more.

4.Texture Lovers
The name says it all and it’s hard to find a pixel on the site that doesn’t contain some sort of texture on it. Providing a variety of free texture packs and quality design tutorials this site offers a lot more than just quality textures.

5.Stock.xchng
Finding quality royalty free photos on the web is always a hassle and Stock.xchng is the best free photo site I’ve come across. They have a few hundred thousand photos that can be downloaded in a variety of sizes. They won’t always have the images you may be seeking but they are all free and most of them are in good enough shape to used for quality web site designs.