SpyreStudios - Design and Development Magazine

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.

With the amount of content available online these days, we sometimes have to resort to using different techniques in order to show/hide/group some content or information on a web page. Content sliders are very popular because they work and usually don’t hinder usability and in many cases can even improve the user experience. Today we’ll […]

There are many different coding styles, some do not like indentation, some like to capitalize certain things, others like to add more than one element on a line, the main train of thought is they are all after one common thing: organization and better code. Without influencing my coding style, we’ll discuss ten tips for […]