Since Elliot Jay Stocks so poignantly told us to destroy the Web 2.0 look, we’ve witnessed a de-shinification of the Web, with fewer glass buttons, beveled edges, reflections, special-offer badges, vulgar gradients with vibrant colors and diagonal background patterns. The transformation has been welcomed with relief by all but the most hardened gloss-enthusiasts. However, design and aesthetics work in mysterious ways, and no sooner does one Web design trend leave us before another appears.

Can you take a simple list and use different Cascading Style Sheets to create radically different list options? The Listamatic shows the power of CSS when applied to one simple list.

If you're like most people, you feel like a baby when it comes to visual design. You sometimes have a vague sense of what you want, but can't articulate it or make it come about. All you can do is point and cry. This guide will help you communicate with conscious skill. It will show you how to create designs that are easy to understand and attractive.


Beyond giving you practical tools, I hope this guide inspires you. One of my favorite quotes is, "I open my eyes and I see paradise." What a great gift vision is! What an incredible way to connect to the world around us and to each other. My hope is that this guide will allow you to communicate with more creativity and more control – and that you'll want to learn more.

The floating widgets plugin makes it easy to add a widgetized area right above or beside your main content regardless of which theme you are using. You can have full control of where and how your widgets are displayed without having to edit your theme at all.

Position of the widget area - currently floating widgets can only be injected right before the "content" section of your site and can be set to "float" right or left so your content wraps around them. Future versions will make it possible to dynamically add widget areas to other sections of the page.

I bought a new iMac, as referenced in the previous post, and have since been obsessed with tricking it out and maximizing its newness. This weekend, against better judgement, I took an afternoon to make custom icons for the applications in my doc. It was totally fun to do, though far more time-consuming than originally planned. I highly suggest everyone skip trying to do it manually and instead opt for Candybar, an awesome application by Panic. You can manually adjust almost all of them (by digging through the resource folders and replacing the .icns files), but on some of them it was a bit tricky and took some figuring out (like the finder is impossible to change in snow leopard apparently, but easily changed in candybar). If you want to make your own icons, download FastICNS, which is INCREDIBLY easy to use. If you google “change doc icon” or “change [program] icon” or something similar, you’ll find all kinds of good forums on how to technically do stuff, where to find the .icns files, etc. Here are my icons as seen in the doc and slightly larger to the right:

The definitive WordPress theme for 2010. Buddymatic is a highly extensible Theme Framework for WordPress & WordPress MU blogs including BuddyPress enabled home and member blogs. This framework features 13 widget-ready areas, drop-down menus, grid-based layout samples, plugin integration, shortcodes for your footer, & a whole lot more. BuddyPress 1.1.X functionality is integrated into the framework and activated when BuddyPress is detected. Perfect for any blog or WordPress MU site, Buddymatic is based on Thematic by Ian Stewart and works with Thematic child themes. Buddymatic includes 2 BuddyPress ready child themes: Coffee with Friends by Daisy Olsen and a Buddymatic Sample Child Theme ready for customization.

One of our favorite things about CSS3 is the addition of RGBA, a color mode that adds alpha-blending to your favorite CSS properties. We've kicked the tires on it a bit with our own projects and have found that it helps streamline our CSS and makes scaling things like buttons very easy. To show you how, we've cooked up an example with some super awesome, scalable buttons.

We’ll look at what can be done to style forms in WordPress– which style attributes applied to which form elements will actually give you some sort of customization in almost all OS/browser combinations (with the possible exception of Safari/Camino, and, in one case, Opera.) Results will vary, but with a bit of care you can have your forms looking spiff, if not quite identical, crossplatform. There are also some “caution” signs along the way, areas where, though they can be styled, you will want to watch the results carefully in as many browsers as possible.

Here are 3 awesome ways to use Wordpress’s custom fields.

This is the Chapter II of the Complete WordPress Theme Guide series. This chapter will show you how to build a custom WordPress theme. Although the Codex site provides very good documentations on how to create a theme, but I find it too complicated for a beginner. In this tutorial, I will explain the basics of how WordPress theme works and show you how to convert a static HTML template into a theme. No PHP skill is required, but you need Photoshop and CSS skills to create your own design.

Nicasio Design is proud to announce the launch of our first WordPress plugin that is publicly available. Dynamic Headers does just what you think it would based on the name - it allows you to create highly dynamic header space on your WordPress site.

My goal with Manifest was to create a clean and streamlined theme that focused on the content and not the distractions. It utilizes a single column, 500 pixel wide layout. No sidebars. No widgets.

One of my favorite parts of my site’s recent redesign—and the page that I started the redesign with—is the new Portfolio page. This is where the whole “exposed markup” thing came from.

One of the web 2.0 design and layout trends which I actually quite like is what I am going to call "clean and horizontally divided". Catchy name eh?

Although it drives millions of weblogs all over the world, WordPress is a powerful publishing platform that is increasingly being used to power online magazines and other news-driven Web sites; sites that fall outside the domain of ‘blogs’. Contrary t

notes for a tutorial on designing web pages