Graphic design is a profession, academic discipline and applied art whose activity consists in projecting visual communications intended to transmit specific messages to social groups, with specific objectives. Graphic design is an interdisciplinary branch of design and of the fine arts. Its practice involves creativity, innovation and lateral thinking using manual or digital tools, where it is usual to use text and graphics to communicate visually.
Jeffrey Zeldman is an American entrepreneur, web designer, author, podcaster and speaker on web design. He is the co-founder of A List Apart Magazine and the Web Standards Project. He also founded the design studios Happy Cog and studio.zeldman, and co-founded the A Book Apart imprint and the design conference An Event Apart.
Web standards are the formal, non-proprietary standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of standardized best practices for building web sites, and a philosophy of web design and development that includes those methods.
A web style sheet is a form of separation of content and presentation for web design in which the markup of a webpage contains the page's semantic content and structure, but does not define its visual layout (style). Instead, the style is defined in an external style sheet file using a style sheet language such as CSS or XSLT. This design approach is identified as a "separation" because it largely supersedes the antecedent methodology in which a page's markup defined both style and structure.
Molly E. Holzschlag was an American author, lecturer and advocate of the Open Web. She wrote or co-authored 35 books on web design and open standards, including The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web. She was nicknamed the "Fairy Godmother of the Web".
Tantek Çelik is a Turkish-American computer scientist, currently the Web standards lead at Mozilla Corporation. Çelik was previously the chief technologist at Technorati. He worked on microformats and is one of the principal editors of several Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) specifications. He is author of HTML5 Now: A Step-by-Step Video Tutorial for Getting Started Today (ISBN 978-0-321-71991-1).
The CSS Zen Garden is a World Wide Web development resource "built to demonstrate what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design." It launched in May 2003.
A List Apart is a webzine that explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.
Nick Finck is a UX & design professional, advisor, mentor, coach, speaker and is the founder of Craft & Rigor, a design operations consultancy, in Seattle, Washington. He is known as the co-creator of progressive enhancement. Nick was a co-creator if the Web Standards Project (WaSP) Education Task Force curriculum (Interact/WaSP) which was later merged into the W3C’s learning material.
Acid2 is a webpage that test web browsers' functionality in displaying aspects of HTML markup, CSS 2.1 styling, PNG images, and data URIs. The test page was released on 13 April 2005 by the Web Standards Project. The Acid2 test page will be displayed correctly in any application that follows the World Wide Web Consortium and Internet Engineering Task Force specifications for these technologies. These specifications are known as web standards because they describe how technologies used on the web are expected to function.
The Web Standards Project (WaSP) was a group of professional web developers dedicated to disseminating and encouraging the use of the web standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, along with other groups and standards bodies.
Tableless web design is a web design method that avoids the use of HTML tables for page layout control purposes. Instead of HTML tables, style sheet languages such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to arrange elements and text on a web page.
Progressive enhancement is a strategy in web design that puts emphasis on web content first, allowing everyone to access the basic content and functionality of a web page, whilst users with additional browser features or faster Internet access receive the enhanced version instead. This strategy speeds up loading and facilitates crawling by web search engines, as text on a page is loaded immediately through the HTML source code rather than having to wait for JavaScript to initiate and load the content subsequently, meaning content ready for consumption "out of the box" is served immediately, and not behind additional layers.
Steven Heller is an American art director, journalist, critic, author, and editor who specializes in topics related to graphic design.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML. CSS is a cornerstone technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and JavaScript.
Christopher Richard Schmitt was a web designer, author, trainer, and speaker who lived in Austin, TX.
The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web is a book by web designers Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag, published in 2005.
In web development, the CSS box model refers to how HTML elements are modeled in browser engines and how the dimensions of those HTML elements are derived from CSS properties. It is a fundamental concept for the composition of HTML webpages. The guidelines of the box model are described by web standards World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifically the CSS Working Group. For much of the late-1990s and early 2000s there had been non-standard compliant implementations of the box model in mainstream browsers. With the advent of CSS2 in 1998, which introduced the box-sizing property, the problem had mostly been resolved.
Separation of content and presentation is the separation of concerns design principle as applied to the authoring and presentation of content. Under this principle, visual and design aspects are separated from the core material and structure (content) of a document. A typical analogy used to explain this principle is the distinction between the human skeleton and human flesh which makes up the body's appearance. Common applications of this principle are seen in Web design and document typesetting.
Cindy Sang-Ching Li was a web designer, author, and speaker known for her expertise in CSS, user experience, and accessibility. She was a member of the CSS Working Group created by the World Wide Web Consortium.
