1. Using Pre-made Form Elements
Often when designing a web comp we need to incorporate items that are part of the browser GUI. These elements, like it or not, are part of the overall design. So its often many designer’s habit to fire up their browser, find a checkbox, radio button, text input, etc. and grab a screen shot. However, there is a better way. The Designer’s Toolbox has done all this for us and organized every browser’s unique elements into an easy to use layered PSD file. Just keep them nearby and whenever you need a browser GUI element you can…
Posts Tagged ‘cross browser’
Being a More Efficient Web Designer
Taming Firefox’s Button Element
Recently I came across a little cross browser bug concerning the “button” element that caused some headaches between Webkit browsers and Firefox. The button element can be a great tool that is generally under utilized. It offers many more flexible options than the “input” element and degrades more gracefully than the “a” element. A great writeup can be found on the Particle Tree blog (Creators of the amazing form creation tool, Wufoo).
The problem I was encountering was when I was adding a span inside the button for design resigns and realized that no matter what I did Firefox was adding a…
Read MoreWeb Marketing Association Awards Billups Design
This is indeed something to celebrate! Billups Design has been once again recognized by the Web Marketing Association Awards for 2009, earning the Consumer Goods Standard of Excellence Award. We are excited to receive this award on behalf of Nike and the Nike ID Custom Shoe Builder application launched earlier this year. More exciting yet, the project was hailed by Nike as a major success and they have now designated Billups Design a preferred agency. Thank you to all the usual suspects – you’ve done it again!
Read MoreAdobe releases BrowserLab for Web Designers
What started as an idea in our humble office on the north side of Chicago is now available to web designers worldwide!
BrowserLab, formerly named Meer Meer, was made available for free trial download on June 2. Read the press release here.
Our principals, Charles Stevenson and Ted Billups, formed a collaboration with Joshua Hatwich and Dean Vukas in 2006 to develop a web-based experience testing tool that would streamline web designers’ cross-browser testing processes and save them thousands of dollars on hardware required to do the tasks.
Together our team worked on all facets of this nascent SaaS idea: application development, remote…
Read MoreGetting Your Pages Ready for IE8
As IE 6 starts fading into the soft glow of the sunset in the distance we need to start looking ahead to IE 8 compatibility. Internet Explorer 8 was released a few weeks ago and according to the W3Schools.com its already climbed to 1.4% market share. There’s no doubt its going to gain traction and become one of the most used browsers on the planet. So what new quirks of IE8 are out there, what about our good friends quirks and standards mode, and what about Microsoft’s latest proprietary IE 8 features?
CSS Improvements
The day IE 8 came out we posted…
Read MoreIt’s Finally Time for IE6’s Curtain Call
In the world of web development there has been a recent push from all around the world to finally drop support for IE6. It’s understandable since IE8 is now released and IE6 is about 8 years old, an antique in computer years. However, there are still a measurable amount of users still launching IE6 as their primary browser, 17.4% of all users according to w3schools. So should we abandon the traditional model of graceful degradation and cross browser compatibility and stop supporting IE6? Some very substantial web developers have said yes.
37signals.
37signals started phasing out support for ie6 starting in October 1, 2008.…
IE8 Browser Showdown With Safari 4 and Firefox 3
IE8 is here! Some of you may be ignoring that exclamation mark thinking, “Great, now I have 3 IE’s to cross browser test”. Or do you? Since IE8 officially launched at 9am Pacific time this morning I spent the next 3 hours upgrading Vista with the 90 or so upgrades it asked me to do before I could finally install IE8. I then proceeded to ask myself that same question every web developer out there is thinking, “How big of a pain in the ass is this IE going to be”. So I did a few test and benchmarks just…
Read More4 Techniques to Display Any Typeface in HTML
Typography on the web has always left something to be desired. With so few options it can be frustrating to many web designers. However, recently there have been many developments on the web typography frontier and now with a little extra work there are ways to get any typeface you want to display on your web pages.
1. 
sIFR is perhaps the best known dynamic text replacement technique. It was first conceived by Shaun Inman as a way to dynamically replace HTML text with flash text. It’s a great solution from a user standpoint because the text not only looks great, but it…
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