Building an Icon Factory
By Randal L. Schwartz
There's no doubt about it. I'll never be mistaken as a "Web designer," as the term has come to be used. I'm not very good at drawing things, and I tend to spend more of my energy making sure the content gets delivered in accessible ways, without making sure it also looks good.
However, I was tired of people describing my company's site at www.stonehenge.com as "great content, but it sure looks ugly." So, I consulted some designer friends, and came up with a makeover. As always, it's a work in progress, but if you compare it with the old site, you'll see that I was at least open to new ideas. One such idea was to give the site a more "curved" look by adding rounded corners wherever possible.
A lot of the design process involved looking at variously colored rounded corners, anchoring the corners of a box made with table elements. The designer traditionally makes these corners using some graphic tool, then laboriously uploads the file to the server along with the edited HTML to see if everything plays correctly.
But that's because most designers aren't programmers. Because I didn't want to go through all that work while I was dinking around, and I was already editing the HTML directly on the server, I decided to make a smart URL that generated the corner images as needed.
A Nice Blue Box
Here's the basic strategy. Let's start with a blue box with nice rounded corners, and some content in the middle.
