Versatile Background Patterns With CSS
One thing that has always bugged me about background patterns in web design is the lack of versatility in changing colours. It has always felt like changing the colour of the pattern could be easily done using CSS background colours, but I could never dial down the process to best achieve this.
Thankfully for me this excellent tutorial on Creating Reusable & Versatile Background Patterns from Web Designer Wall details exactly what is involved in extracting the pattern from an existing image.
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Book Review: Simple and Usable
Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design by Giles Colborne explores four core strategies to attain interface simplicity, “Remove, Organise, Hide, Displace”. This book gets to the crux of many of the key challenges to organising and presenting information via digital media in a manageable, motivational and easily digestible chunks.
The most striking aspect of this book is the layout, each page is a double-page spread comprising of a left-hand page of text and a right-hand page that is a full-page illustration. At first glance you would be forgiven for thinking that this could be a method of padding, as a means to disguise a lack of content. However when reading this book it quickly becomes obvious that this style works very well as a method of maintaining interest and absorbing information effortlessly.
This is the type of book that can be read in single session, however it is also one that I will come back to again and again when I need thoughtful inspiration; almost every page had a tip that I wanted to put into action, or a phrase I wanted to quote.
