Inspiration
CSS Zen Garden is one of my favourite sites for inspiration and I thought that it was time to point out a few of my favourites from the site. It’s one of the sites, along with Eric Meyer’s, that first demonstrated to me how powerful CSS is and the sheer beauty of the designs that can be accomplished with it. I suspect that these are most people’s starting points in CSS, whether you’re a pure designer or more of a coder/developer with a love of beautiful design like me. I am indeed geek enough to own “The Zen of CSS Design” and it is rather thumbed through because it manages to look gorgeous while providing dozens of hints, tips and concepts for things that can be done.
The part of me that appreciates clever ideas adores the CSS Zen Garden concept of one HTML file and hundreds of potential CSS designs. It’s often a good reminder that what I’m attempting probably isn’t impossible (although it might seem like it) but will need a bit of cleverness. And designers shouldn’t let coders say it’s impossible - our job is to make those gorgeous designs work as functional websites, hopefully adding to the site rather than dulling it down.
But I digress and now return to the point.
Top of the list of favourites is Museum. I love the surface simplicity of the black and white design, with all the detail that’s there when you look more closely. The page flows, it’s interesting to look at and the text has become a part of the design and shape of the page.
Dead or Alive is another black and white design that’s fun as well as good looking.
CSS Zen Ocean isn’t one of the official designs, but it’s great fun and demonstrates some interesting uses for transparency in PNGs. The designer has also made it as cross-browser compatible as possible, despite IE’s current lack of support for alpha-transparency in PNGs, by targetting IE with GIF replacements. Looks best in a modern browser such as Firefox, but I like the creativity in this one.
Bonsai Sky is another design that shows off some special effects in CSS - check out the window border and the little guy on the right hand edge of the screen.
Gemination needs to be viewed in a CSS-standards compatible browser such as Firefox or Opera and then in Internet Explorer to understand why it’s cool. It’s a great demonstration of how different the CSS support is in the two types of browsers and for once that has been used as an advantage, targetting different designs for each. Lots of the techniques used in this one can be ported out to hack around IEs bugs and get sites looking right in both browsers, but I like the way that the designer has gone in the opposite direction to produce completely different designs.
I’m sure that I’ve missed lots of the ones that I wanted to point out, but I think that I covered the basic reasons why I visit the CSS Zen Garden regularly.
In other slightly exciting news, I am going to be designing a website for a Canadian film editor. Very exciting prospect there.