“The new breed of CSS3 shizzle even allows a self-confessed design amateur like myself to produce some fairly tasty looking designs.” I full heartedly agree with this statement by Chris Mills in his article titled “CSS3 Bling in the Real World.” What excites me the most about finally learning the ins and outs of CSS3 is the fact that now I can look less like an web design amateur and more like I professional in this industry. I love that I now know how to add drop shadows and rounded corners – those are small elements that really brighten up a page and add some serious style and personality. However, I admit that I still need to work on my animation and gradient skills – not to mention my lack of ability to add a dropbox. But the fact that this article gives me hope in learning these more challenging design elements is enough for me!
I love the tone and the feel of this article. It’s conversational and relatable and makes web publishing almost seem fun. However, I appreciate the fact that the author, Mills, was also realistic. He admitted that there some obstacles and things to be aware of. I think it’s good that he covered some of the basic CSS3 elements, and how to make it as cross-browser as possible. I think that is a very practical thing to know and he made a point out of that.
I also appreciate that he didn’t walk us through all his code – sometimes that’s helpful but with CSS3 I don’t think it was a necessity. I just wanted to know the CSS code and that’s what he shared. I felt cool that when he was talking about using Font Squirrel, I knew what he was referring too. I also learned something new that may be useful to me in the future, I leaned how to round only corner of a box – that’s pretty neat! I’ll admit that some of the CSS3 code he used was complicated and over my head, but I still feel as if I got the basic idea of what he was talking about and I felt like I was on track with what he was saying.
I wasn’t aware that you could add a gradient to a box without creating that box first in Photoshop, but I think that’s what Mills was doing in this tutorial. I would like to try and use that in my own work because that may be easier for me to do.
The only thing that I question this article on is it’s relevance. This was written in 2011. Aren’t things different now? I’m sure more browsers support CSS3 than this article suggests. So how much of this across-all-browsers stuff do we really have to know? Just a question that I had!