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Introduction 9

Part II: Looking Good with CSS ............................................................

Part II begins with some practical exploration of the details of CSS design: how

you position the pages various zones, conditional formatting, relative position-

ing, absolute and fixed elements, and stacking flow. You go on to see all about

handling text: a refresher course for designers who need to brush up on clas-

sic fonts, weights, special effects, and good text design principles in general.

This section also serves as a course in text display techniques for those new

to the subject. All the essentials are covered, from simple concepts such as

font size, to advanced subjects like the uses of the various font families (and

why you should avoid some of them like the plagues that they are). This book

also covers the kinds of values you can provide to CSS properties, like color

and position. You explore the units of length and measurement, color values,

percentages, and related positioning and sizing specs. Part II concludes with

a chapter where you play around with some great designer secrets: kerning,

leading, custom backgrounds, adding textures, and using graphics applica-

tions to improve the quality of some of your page elements. In general, you

find out how to achieve striking, compelling design and how to manage some-

thing equally important: avoiding vulgarity in your designs.

Part III: Adding Artistry: Design and Composition with CSS ............

Part III picks up and expands the topics that concluded Part II: how to make

beautiful Web pages using CSS. You consider the elements of good page com-

position, the secrets of Web design gurus, and the issues involving symmetry.

(Is severely symmetrical layout ever a good idea, outside of debutante-ball

and wedding invitations?) You also find out how to take a new look at your

overall design, abstracting the shapes so that you’re not reading any text or

viewing any photos. Instead, you’re looking at the black, white, and gray rec-

tangles (and hopefully other shapes) that compose your page.

In this Part, you go on to manipulate margins, padding, borders, lines, and

frames. These elements allow you to build effective zones within your page,

cuing the viewer about the nature of each zone and collecting related informa-

tion inside separate zones. For example, a caption and the photo it describes

can be considered a logical zone, so you might want to frame them, or use a

line beneath them, or add some margins around them.

This Part also explores the best way to display tables and lists and how to

get rid of tables that are not displayed. (Traditionally, tables have been used

as hooks on which to hang the other elements of a Web page, allowing design-

ers to position things. Now, you can get that job done better with pure CSS.)

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