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I’m passionate about branding. At my previous company, Apples To Oranges, we were fortunate to be able to do a lot of branding and identity projects—either creating new brands, or evolving existing ones. As designers, our work never sits in a vacuum. Each piece is part of the brand’s visual identity. It’s our job to ensure the sites we design not only look good, but also reinforce and communicate the message of the brand.

When Ryan Carson of Carson Systems contacted us about a rebranding project for their series of conferences, naturally I jumped at the chance. The project consisted of creating an identity and website for three conferences. The first conference, The Future of Web Apps, had already hosted an event in London, and had one coming up in San Francisco. The other two conferences were called The Future of Web Design and The Future of Online Advertising, which were both scheduled to start sometime in 2007. My role in the project was creative director, and I worked with our lead designer, Ian Main, and illustrator/designer Jason Ruddy.

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The PNG image has been widely overlooked by the web design community—and mostly for good reason. Until recently, it hasn’t been possible to take full advantage of the format and have it work reliably in all browsers. But, with proper PNG support in Internet Explorer 7, and some handy JavaScript and CSS tricks to account for older browsers, we can use PNG images to greatly enhance our design vocabulary.

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Arm yourself with the knowledge of how different file types of images can be used to achieve transparency on web-pages. It’s important to first understand these basics. Then learn how to push the limitations of browser support. Take a look at what others are doing with transparency on the Web; only then you’ll be able to learn how to get creative with transparency in Web design.

There are well-established methods of imitating Web transparency that have been developed to overcome browser support issues. While we can appreciate past solutions, it’s important to break out of this faux methodology and learn to work with PNG graphics. We are at a tipping point where IE7 continues to grab market share. And fortunately, IE7 has thet support for full Alpha Transparent PNG graphics. In the near future, transparent PNG graphics will have excellent browser support.

Ultimately, it’s necessary to consider creative uses for transparency on the Web. This article reviews the use of faux transparency methods, presents examples of transparent images on both fixed and dynamic backgrounds, and points to creative solutions that take full creative advantage of today’s modern Web transparency effects.

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The concept of floats is probably one of the most unintuitive concepts in CSS. Floats are often misunderstood and blamed for floating all the context around it, causing readability and usability problems. However, the reason for these problems isn’t the theory itself, but the way the theory is interpreted - by developers and browsers.

Still, if you take a closer look at the float theory, you’ll find out out that it isn’t that complex as it appears to be. Most related problems are caused by the older versions of (take a guess) Internet Explorer. If you know the bugs, you can control the way information is presented in a more sophisticated, profound way.

Let’s try to tackle the issue and clarify some usual misunderstandings, which always appear once floats are being used. We’ve browsed through dozens of related articles and selected the most important things you should keep in mind developing css-based layouts with floats.

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If you are front end coder you must know how important is to make cross browses, valid CSS and xHTML code. And also you must know how much time we are spending in all those hacks and fixes for various browsers. I’ve written about some of them earlier on PNG transparency issues, Yellow fields in web form, Vertical align div etc..

Here is the list of 10 hand picked CSS hacks and tricks which can help you in your CSS code and also save some time.

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