A great little web app that collects images used on a chosen site and converts them to a single sprite via the use of a browser bookmarklet. It even generates the CSS you need to use in order to get the sprite up and running. I’ve not had the chance to use it in anger [...]

The founder of Noupe, Noura Yehia, has launched the web design equivalent of the excellent MacHeist. $49 for a selection of apps, WordPress templates, icons, ebooks, photos amongst other goodies. Worth it for Smashing Magazine’s eBook and Icon Dock’s Moi Vector Set of icons alone. The rest can be considered a bonus and a very good [...]

Smashing Magazine has posted an article by Thomas Giannattasio who argues that Photoshop should not be dropped and forgotten about in favour of designing in the browser. Here are a few interesting points: Experimentation is the key to creativity. Without it, the brain simply follows what it regards as the safest route, and the result [...]

Type rendering seems to be Jason Santa Maria’s main complaint with current software used for web design and many would agree, myself included. I would also like to add to his list of a what a web design app should consist of is an accurate (and easy) way to reproduce CSS effects such as the [...]

Having worked as an in-house designer for a major travel company, I know the pain of having to deal with upper management trying to take things into their own hands. I always find it interesting when a client hires a designer because of their expertise but then decides to nitpick every decision they make. I [...]

Hands up if you’re a web designer who uses Photoshop and ever thought that this might be a possibility? Yeah, me neither. John Nack, the Principal Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop, has put forward an idea of Photoshop gaining the ability to include actual rendered HTML and CSS (via WebKit) elements within a .psd file. [...]

Hands up if you’re a web designer who uses Photoshop and ever thought that this might be a possibility? Yeah, me neither. John Nack, the Principal Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop, has put forward an idea of Photoshop gaining the ability to include actual rendered HTML and CSS (via WebKit) elements within a .psd file. [...]

I’ve been looking for something like this for a while. Avoids the annoying problem of typing too much text and not being able to see all you’ve typed without having to scroll in a small box. It’s also smart enough to resize down when you delete text that has caused it to grow. I may [...]

Now the summer is pretty much over here in England and the World Cup no longer takes up most of my spare time, I can finally dedicate some much needed time to Inspect Element and it’s been far too long. If you’re wondering, I have plenty of great blog post ideas lined up (my Evernote account is [...]

Eric Meyer’s excellent thoughts on why browser prefixes are not as bad as some people make them out to be and I completely agree. So the next time you find yourself grumbling about declaring the same thing four times, once for each browser, remember that the pain is temporary. It’s a little like a vaccine—the [...]

Inspect Element has been up and running for about ten months now. Hopefully it has provided you with enough useful information which you've been able to apply to your own work and improve what you do. It certainly has helped me improve my own work which was one of the many goals I set out before I started. Some of you may not know that Inspect Element is a one-man-show and basically I've just become too busy lately to doing any work on new tutorials and articles. You may have noticed that I hav

Communicating effectively with your target market is essential for any business, and when it comes to the online world, being able to communicate clearly across multiple cultural divides is simply fundamental. According to a 2008 report by business strategists Forrester Consulting, ‘global businesses are losing market share worth as much as $1.6 billion USD per [...]

CSS3 is here to make our lives easier as web designers and developers. While it's not something we can always rely on heavily for layout purposes just yet, we can use it to enhance certain aspects of our designs by spending a considerably less amount of time doing so. However, CSS3 has not been created for the sole purpose of making it easier and quicker to create a website but also so we can create much better sites than we ever could with CSS before. Here are a few examples of how CSS3

Typography on the web has previously been confined to a set of web-safe fonts due to their dependance of being on every computer but now that has changed. It's one of the most satisfying and rewarding aspects of web design when you get it right but can also be one of the most difficult to do so. Here are some tools, resources and free fonts to help you on your quest for quality typography.

Typography on the web has previously been confined to a set of web-safe fonts due to their dependance of being on every computer but now that has changed. It's one of the most satisfying and rewarding aspects of web design when you get it right but can also be one of the most difficult to do so. Here are some tools, resources and free fonts to help you on your quest for quality typography.