24 ways

Dan Cederholm is a skillful designer who’s attention to pixels could ne’er be finer. He brings technique for good boys and girls of how to create nice graphical curls. So on the night before Christmas all through your house, get your page curling by stirring your mouse.

Jason Santa Maria continues our mini series looking at colour as he trips the light fantastic with your corporate brand guidelines. When is a colour not a colour? Read on and find out why old Saint Nic’s collars don’t match his cuffs.

Dave Shea casts a critical eye over the process of choosing a colour palette – in particular, techniques for picking tones from a photograph. As Santa found one foggy Christmas eve, choice of colour can be absolutely critical to success.

Derek Featherstone contemplates the effects that the lack of CSS or JavaScript may have on your scripts. Let the spirits of Christmas past, present and future guide you so that your scripts needn’t give up the ghost in the face of adversity.

Nate Koechley demonstrates how the compact and powerful YUI Grids stylesheet can be used to conjure up all manner of layouts from the simple to the complex. Take it easy over the festive period, and let the YUI Grids do all the hard work for you.

Cameron Moll eases us into the idea of developing for the mobile web with four quick tips to get you started. Sleigh bells ring, are you listening? In the lane someone has a mobile device and they’re trying to get to your content. Hark!

Jeremy Keith appraises the humble hyperlink and highlights some of the more interesting, and perhaps lesser-known attributes that can be used to enrich the semantic value of your links. Consider it something to mull over whilst you polish off that gingerbread.

Shaun Inman reveals a powerful method for keeping light-on-dark text looking lean, mean and fighting clean. Stay looking trim this Christmas with tantalising tree-topping typography trick from the internets’ Mr Cool himself.

Natalie Downe describes a simple approach to usability testing for those of us working to tight timescales or budgets. That’d be nearly all of us then. Learn how to make the most of your available user testing time, and perhaps this year you’ll not end up quizzing auntie as she stuffs her face with turkey.

Andy Clarke details an approach for embedding production notes inside your document – a useful aid to project management and team communications throughout the development phases of any project. Sounds like Santa isn’t the only one who’ll be getting notes this Christmas.

John Allsop applies a little bit of style to exhibit how life can be breathed into any instance of the hCard microformat. Like the wrapping on a good gift, add a little sparkle to your pages with this handy step-by-step tutorial.

Ian Lloyd labels up and ships out a tip for improving the usability of form labels. Whilst checking the labels on the gifts under your tree, why not take some time out to check the labels on your forms and see where it might be appropriate to add some extra touches.

Richard Rutter scrutinises the typographical proportions and spacing that gives a written page its rhythm. Help your page sing like the herald angels, and still have time for a mince pie and brandy.

James Edwards takes the good stuff down off the shelf and illustrates how forms can be built to be both highly stylable and remain accessible to all comers. Good looking and accessible all at once? Surely it can’t be so.

Drew McLellan investigates some of the ways JavaScript can be written to help it co-exist responsibly within your pages, and other pages too. We could all do with a little bit more peaceful co-existance over the holidays, couldn’t we auntie. Pass the gravy.

Mark Norman Francis looks at the increasingly ubiquitous tag cloud, and specifically how it can be marked up in HTML. It’s evidentially not a clear-cut issue, as everyone does it differently. What we need is some kind of markup junkie to weigh in with his suggested method. Oh, wait…

Veerle Pieters saves us from the code (the incessant code!) with a dazzling design technique using Illustrator’s Mesh feature. Coders take note! You can make something really pretty by just following a few basic steps. Will wonders never cease?

Ian Forrester gives an introduction to using XML’s forgotten child, XSL, as a client-side transformation language. Like a warming wooly scarf against the biting winter wind, Ian shows how XSL can be used to take the edge of even the ugliest XML documents to make them beautiful again. Thou shalt find the winter’s rage freeze thy blood less coldly.

Peter-Paul Koch continues our focus on JavaScript and Accessibility by demonstrating how fall-back HTML elements can be convincingly hidden when their functionality is to be replaced by Ajax. A viable alternative to what could be considered to be flashing your underwear at your users. No one wants that.

Mike Davies kicks off a mini-series on Accessibility and JavaScript by considering a number of techniques for hiding links, yet keeping them accessible. And when I say hiding links, I don’t mean hiding your links to seedy underworld of organised crime, no sir. Moving swiftly along…

Andy Budd explores the thorny issue of adding rounded corners to boxes, this time looking at what solutions lie waiting for us with CSS3. Consider it a little like feeling the presents under a Christmas tree … you know what’s there, you just can’t quite have it yet.

Christian Heilmann frolics with Flickr and provides a super simple way of using photos on your site without the need for server-side scripts or the full API. Want to bore the internets with pictures of your cat? Well now you can, without even touching the server, Gran.

Rachel Andrew delves into the world of CSS generation and looks at some CSS techniques that will prevent you from tearing your hair out as well giving you more time to shop for a hat to cover the bald patches.

Drew McLellan examines a method of enabling users to control their interface with a dynamic text trimmer, similar to that found in Safari RSS. Feeling bloated? Lose some weight at the touch of a button.