SpyreStudios - Design and Development Magazine

A while ago we shared 25 great web-design and development books and since this earlier post got a great response (and we’ve read a lot more books since), we’ve now gathered another 25.

In this list you’ll find books about design, theory, development, css, html and a lot more. I hope you enjoy the post!

For Christmas this year, my beautiful wife gave me a copy of The Web Designer’s Idea Book, Volume 2. Obviously, I have been perusing the book, and I am finding that there are tons of awesome web designs to take in. I’m super happy with the gift and I expect that it will prove to be a highly valuable resource throughout 2011, and beyond.

Yet, even just a quick perusal of the book reveals the prevailing influence of Photoshop (or other graphics programs) on the industry at large. Today, the web is full of beautiful, rich and colourful graphics that continuously amaze and impress us in all manner of very legitimate ways. But just because we can include all of this incredible imagery, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we have to. Sometimes, the simple use of colour, shape and typography can create an attractive and elegant design all on its own.

In this tutorial, we’ll be revisiting the Brillante blog design, covering the PSD slicing, HTML/CSS coding, custom fonts embedding and some handy cool tips to improve your website performance.

This is Part 2 of 3 of the Photoshop blog design called Brilliante, published some time ago on SpyreStudios and designed by Mahmoud Khaled Deiab.

In this second part, I’m gonna walk you through the PSD to HTML/CSS coding process. Third part will be about creating a WordPress theme. Let’s begin!

Today we’ll be creating a beautiful vertical CSS3 navigation, without the use of images. Basically we’ll display a circle with an icon in the center. When the user hovers over the circle, it expands and shows a short description.

Now you may be wondering: how are we going to display an icon without images? Well, Drew Wilson’s (fabulous) Pictos font makes this quite simple. Unfortunately (but understandably) it’s not free, you can purchase is for $49 here. Luckily, there are other icon fonts out there like iconic, which you can use for free.

I should also mention that this has been tested using Webkit browsers only (Safari, Chrome). It may work in other browsers but probably with limited support. Check out the demo here!

Today we’ll be creating a bar that pops up at the top of a page, and stays above the content (similar to ‘hellobar’). The popup bar was only tested in Chrome and Safari and may not work in other browsers. The bar can be used to display information, for example your latest blog post, to the user.

The way the bar pops out at the top makes sure it’ll be seen. And after the visitor has seen the information, he/she has the option to hide the bar.

Many of you have probably already seen some of those CSS3 generators that have been poppin’ up? Have you perhaps been wondering how they’re made? Wonder no more, that’s what we’ll be creating today, using CSS3, HTML5 and jQuery.

The CSS3 generator we will be creating is Webkit only, so make sure you open up the demo in a Webkit browser like Safari or Chrome.