CSS Layout

Domagoj from Itookia did a an excellent job by writing a wonderful tutorial on creating vista toolbar by using CSS

You can get a feel of how this technique works by simply going to their demo page and test it out.

As you may have expected, the designer uses the Sliding door technique to achieve this sleek effect. This tutorial is also easy to absorb and implement. Try it out and let us know if you like it

Full tutorial here.

Bartelme Design, a design agency located in Graz, Austria, has recently released a smiley development kit for free use

I have downloaded the .PSD file and went ahead to play around with the possibilities and created the smiley on the right. This is really a cool kit that allows the designer to design their own smiley with different add ons. In addition, you can also play around with its eyes, body, mouth and background.

You may also want to drop by their showroom to view their high quality designs. You will definitely find a great deal of amazing designs that may help to trigger your creativity

You can go ahead and download the file here.

Alex Griffioen has recently written a neat tutorial illustrating how to design nice buttons using only CSS. The following is an image of how the button looks like upon completion.

In the tutorial, he talks about how to style the buttons respectively along with the required CSS codes. As you may expected, this button is created with the help of sliding door technique; where two complementing images creating the illusion of a single, stretching image.

In the end of the tutorial, Alex also points out a small workaround for Internet Explorer browser
Check out this tutorial

I recently received a review request from Blogge which is a techno-blog launched by Dassnagar Infosystems. As I seldom review a blog but more on pure CSS layouts, I thought to drop by their site and check out their offers

The first page I that I visit to find out more about them is the Who are We section. It seems that they have a greater vision than any other average web solution companies. In addition, they judge their success by When our Customers Win - we Win Too

This blog also provides several very useful information such as CSS Tips, AJAX technologies, browser, web graphics and Search Engines issues for the readers, what a broad coverage Averaging one post every two days, this is a pretty active blog with good content. You should be able to benefit from reading this blog frequently.

Overall, it is my pleasure to review such a nice blog that bears great vision. All the best to BLOGGE and make sure to pay them a visit

I have always been visiting Dynamic Drive for their CSS library for quite some time now and thought that it would be nice to share this great resources with you

So what does Dynamic Drive has in store for us? The great CSS library contains navigation menu, form effects, cool links and button effects as well as CSS powered images gallery.

I have used their CSS horizontal navigation menu for some of my sites before and they never let me down I am sure you will certainly find some great menus in their Horizontal CSS Menu.

In addition to the above great stuff, you can also find lots of CSS basic layouts in Dynamic Drive as well. They provide download for different CSS layout types such as fluid, fixed, two / three column. Hope that you will find the site useful

Deziner Folio has recently released a set of beautiful Web 2.0 badges for free usage

These badges are available in .PSD format and you can change the gradient in PhotoShop. The text is also changeable by amending the layer text using PhotoShop.

You can start downloading these badges in Deziner Folio’s site.

Thanks for the great design, Deziner Folio

This is a very elegant gallery system that every Webmaster is waiting for. JonDesign’s SmoothGallery is compliant with the major browsers like Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer 6 & 7 and Safari.

With a total size of only 16KB, this script is very compact as compared to most of the other similar scripts. In addition, it is free and easily installed within five steps

I find this application works best to show products’ screen shots. Drop by the site and feel the powerful demo.

DHTMLSite.com has recently compiled a list of free CSS and JavaScript powered calendars that looks pretty neat for the Webmasters’ usage.

These calendars can be useful when you want to allow people to pick a date from the form or simply display the monthly information. Most of the calendars can be customized if you have some basic CSS knowledge as well

A great difference between CSS and JavaScript powered calendars is that some users may have their browser’s JavaScript capability disabled. Therefore, they cannot see or use any calendars that are JavaScript powered. On the other hand, CSS powered calendars can be displayed on all the browsers and they are getting more and more popular these days.

You can find the useful list of calendars at DHTML Site

Dynamic Drive has recently released the CSS Glowing Tabs Menu for free to the worldwide users. The following shows a preview of what it looks like:

This script does not use the JavaScript pre-load technique and it can therefore achieve a better performance (with the hover ability).

The images are also available on the site and anyone can easily change the colors by editing them using appropriate software like Photoshop or Fireworks

Enjoy!

Smashing Magazine has recently published 11 almost perfect layouts for businesses. According to them, perfect means clean, usage of modern design elements but remain moderate. The templates must also use intuitive color schemes and high contrasts so as to optimize the text readability and visual perception.

Business layouts tend to be more informative but all these 11 layouts have managed to strike a great balance between design and content. Some of the layouts are shown below:

1. Sumagency

2. Reach Group Consulting

3. Exceel