background color underneath. All this helps the visitor to your site under-
stand that these items in this area, with these colors, have something in
common. And if you really want to attract attention to them, make them puce,
lavenderblush,or some other unusual color. You can tie your color choices
into the content of the Web page too: For example, use a yellow-orange back-
ground for a paragraph that contains a warning about a radioactivity danger.
Even superior to plain color in many situations is a designed background —
a gradient, texture, a picture of clouds... anything that visually amplifies
the message of your site. Many of the best-designed sites load a background
image because creating such an image in a graphics program like Photoshop
gives you control over every single pixel of your background. You can create
pleasing, complex designs of any kind, not simply a single static color:
<body background=”WaterView.jpg”>
If you combine graphically designed backgrounds with animation (see
Chapter 16), you can aspire to win an award... a Web page design award.
Here are some cool sites that can give you some creative inspiration:
http://www.philipkoether.com/
futurefarm.nl
http://www.tomoco.de/
The following page doesn’t feature flashy animation, but the page is well-
designed and shows off some of what CSS can do (while you’re visiting this
site, take a look around — it has some great CSS tutorials and resources):
http://glish.com/css/noah.asp
I have a lot to say about designing backgrounds in Chapter 7 and Chapter 16.
For now, consider color alone.
As with setting margins, positioning text, and many other aspects of Web
design, CSS is clearly superior to traditional HTML when it comes to manag-
ing color. With CSS, you can specify the foreground (text and borders) and
background colors of pretty much everyelement. With traditional HTML,
your ability to set colors is restricted only to a few elements.
CSS1 and CSS2 group all color into a “Color and Background” set of proper-
ties, but in CSS3 promises a new Color family, complete with various new
features such as opacity and a new naming system. See Chapter 15 for more
details on what CSS3 is expected to offer the designer.
114 Part II: Looking Good with CSS
