Open Flash Chart 1.x was great and it works like a dream. But I made some little mistakes which over time grew and anyoyed me and made the source code weird. So I decided it was time to re-jigger the code and make it pretty again. The big change is moving the data format to JSON. This has made a big difference and has allowed some pretty cool new features.

Why choose Open Flash Chart?

This is a little gentle propaganda for the project. Like all opinions, disregard it and make up your own mind.

Edge cases such as

• tooltips encourage user interactivity and data exploration
• what happens to the tooltip when two points are in the same position?
• you can re-size the charts
• missing data
• save the chart as an image
• You can highlight or emphasize one (or many) points

Demonstration

There are many ways you can present numerical, chartable data by styling elements using CSS. Using CSS to style your data prevents you from relying on static images and increases your content’s accessibility.

Below, you’ll read about 8 excellent techniques for styling elements into beautiful, accessible charts and graphs.

1. CSS for Bar Graphs

View Demo Here

This tutorial showcases three ways of graphing data. The Basic CSS Bar Graph example involves a <div> to contain the graph, and styling a <strong> element as a block element and using percentage widths to adjust the width. A great modification of this technique is to use a paragraph <p> element instead of a <strong> tag for semantically-correct HTML. The two other examples use a definition list and unordered list to graph multiple bars.

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Custom Chrome Text Effect

Photoshop Reflections

The Shiny Floor Effect

The Glossy TEXT web2.0 style

Photoshop Tutorials: Texteffect

Web 20 Shiny Floor Effect – video tutorial

Wazir Khan Mosque

he Wazir Khan Mosque in Lahore, Pakistan, is famous for its extensive faience tile work. It has been described as ‘ a mole on the cheek of Lahore’. It was built in seven years, starting around 1634-1635 A.D., during the reign of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jehan. It was built by Shaikh Ilm-ud-din Ansari, a native of Chiniot, who rose to be the court physician to Shah Jahan and later, the Governor of Lahore. He was commonly known as Wazir Khan. (The word wazir means ‘minister’ in Urdu language.) The mosque is located inside the Inner City and is easiest accessed from Delhi Gate.

Rohtas Fort (قلعہ روہتاس – Qila Rohtas)

Rohtas Fort (Urdu: قلعہ روہتاس Qila Rohtas) is a garrison fort built by the great Afghan king Sher Shah Suri. This fort is about 4 km in circumference and the first example of the successful amalgamation of Pukhtun and Hindu architecture in the sub-continent.

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Stacked bar graphs are very helpful when presenting a comparison of data.

This is a stacked bar graph built with CSS (& based on Pure CSS Data Chart).

It uses “definition lists” in the HTML for presenting the data & “unordered lists” for the labels on axes.

Source files can be downloaded from the author’s website & a demo can be found here.

Requirements: No Requirements
Compatibility: All Major Browsers
Website: http://www.thewojogroup.com/2008/12/css-stacked-bar-…
Demo: http://assets.thewojogroup.com/csschart/

Although there are lots of posts that evaluate different design blogs, I haven’t seen many that focus specifically on corporate websites.

Therefore, I thought it would be fun to take a look at the homepages of the Top 30 technology companies and assign them a PASS or FAIL rating based on the quality of their homepage design.

Click on the screenshots to check out each website.

1. Amazon.com: PASS

Although it may be a little cluttered for my taste, it would be short-sighted to say that the Amazon.com homepage is a FAIL.  Amazon has created a company that has landed at the top of the InfoTech 100, and the fact that one hundred percent of their sales are made online shows that they understand how to use their website to attract and retain customers.

2. Apple: PASS

As an Apple user, I may be a little biased, but I honestly don’t think that anyone could look at the Apple homepage and say that it fails in terms of design.  The homepage is uncluttered, provides easy to use navigation and gracefully showcases several of Apple’s products.

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Tempe, Arizona-based Mindspace, a marketing and design firm, released a new website this week, and I think it is a really well-designed interactive piece.

Check it out: Mindspace.net

Talented Front-end Web Developer Chris Wallace of Walmedia and Designer&Developer is back again with a free, brand-spanking new, beautiful, professional WordPress theme.

Annexation is a clean and usable professional WordPress theme that features a two-column layout and a prominent search bar for easy searching of your website. An RSS button provides not only a visual compliment to the design, but also makes it easily accessible to website visitors.

Some features

Integration with Twitter including a custom-designed Twitter icon created by Chris Wallace for your tweets.

Integration with the Last.Fm Records plugin in the footer to showcase the music you’re currently listening to (note: screenshot does not reflect Chris’s true taste in music).

Compatible with WordPress 2.6+

A widgetized sidebar for easy customization.

Preview of the Annexation theme

Here’s a live demonstration of the Annexation WordPress theme on Chris Wallace’s site:

• Live Demo

What’re you waiting for, download the theme already!

Current version

• Version 1.1 (ZIP, 242 KB)

Previous versions

• Version 1.0 (ZIP, 244 KB)

Change Log

Version 1.1

• comments.php fixes
• updated readme.txt

About Chris Wallace

Chris Wallace is a Front-End Developer and President of Walmedia, a web design company. Chris offers free WordPress themes and writes about web design and development on his blog, Designer&Developer. Be sure to check out other themes he’s giving away free.

Designer&Developer is in my “Top 20″ group of RSS feeds (favorite blogs I follow) and I highly recommend subscribing to the Designer&Developer RSS feed.

Cheat sheets (also known as reference cards, reference sheets, etc.) not only helps you remember things quickly, but can also serve as wall decoration for your workspace.

In this post, you’ll find 28 excellent, useful cheat sheets in various file formats for Photoshop, Dreamweaver, colors, typography, and other web-design related topics all in one page with pictures of each cheat sheet.

Photoshop

1- Photoshop CS3 Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat Sheet

Downloads: PDF (Windows), PDF (Mac)

2- Keys for using the Layers palette (HTML)

3- Photoshop Toolbox Reference (HTML)

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Jelly Remake

Web 2.0 Style Logo

How to Make a Web 2.0-Style Logo

Learn to create your own Web2.0 Logo

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