HTML and CSS Fluid Transparent Rounded Corner Boxes

2nd May, 2010

That’s quite a lot to demand of a title, and a box on a website as well it seems. In my work I have had a couple of designs lately that have required me to think up a good and solid way of having four rounded corners in a box that is one of a couple of things:

• Totally fluid, as in it resizes in both axes in accordance with changing content size.
• Each corner needs actual transparency to sit on gradient backgrounds.

There are hundreds of methods posted online about how to do fancy corners on boxes using CSS, but quite a lot of them just don’t have transparency involved, or worse still use a hack here and there or use a sprinkling of absolutely positioned, empty divs.

So what to do about the boxes having exhausted quite an extensive Google search and not finding a method that really suited me? Make one up of course. For those of us still stuck supporting IE6 as well as a raft of other browsers and their various editions, while offering a text resizing facility on the site, this meant it has to be remarkably robust.

The following method is the one I made for four corners only, with no border fanciness. In fact the graphical requirements were so simple that actually all the corners are the same GIF file as a ball, used much like you would a sprite:

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New Site, Old Browser

30th September, 2009

Even though I started this new design with the feeling that I should just ignore Internet Explorer 6, I did realise that there were still visitors doomed to using this browser, either because of their hardware/operating system limitation, familiarity or their company’s refusal to update. I also had all the bits and pieces for adapting a site for 5 and 6 compatibility already in place, and had been adding them as and when I recognised old scenarios that needed them.

So I took this opportunity to start up my old computer, which is running a pretty much clean install of Windows 98 updated as far as it was supported, all on a Pentium 4 with 512mb of RAM and the high-end Geforce 2 GPU: astronomical power compared to what 95 and 98 were intended to work with normally. And then there is Internet Explorer 6!

I was a little bit astonished to discover that despite my fears that the new CSS would collapse in a heap, everything was generally rendering exactly where it was meant to be. The only issues were superficial ones, such as transparent PNGs rendering as grey which were easily fixed. In the end I did make an effort to ensure that users browsing with IE6 do have a reasonable experience.

New Site Design Up and Running

22nd September, 2009

So finally I’ve switched my website to the new design, with a hefty number of new bits and pieces being added so you’ll have to bear with me for a little while as things get sorted out. Some of the bigger changes include integrating twitter (for which I have had an unused account for years) as a sort of microblogging tool, separating my university work from my professional portfolio and integrating a ‘Related Posts’ system which I have had in mind for a long time but have only just discovered a brilliant plugin that does all the hard work for me.

Above is a shot of a couple of the images I’ve produced for new site features.

You can find that related posts plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/similar-posts/. Another plugin by the same authors is one that shows a list of the most recent posts. In the old design I had this functionality hardcoded into the theme footer but now it can be done with a single line of PHP.

Added sIFR to the Site

19th September, 2009

Tired with the poor antialiasing observed in big header fonts, I decided to introduce sIFR to the site. Here’s a preview shot allowing me to use High Tower Text as my page heading:

New Site Design Underway

30th August, 2009

I have actually been slowly working on this (slowly being a bit of an understatement) for a while but keep having to put it off for other commitments. Usually this means I get a bit of time when I’m tired and not up to doing much else and a stint on Fallout III is only going to make things worse.

However here are a couple more screenshots of a general basic layout and more button-y bits since the last lot of menu icons!

Other plans include a bigger better blog post preview image, related posts links, using the excerpt field of posts and some form of proper search function that includes AJAX-ed suggestions.

Marathon Sketch Upload to Flickr

19th August, 2009

I’ve scanned and uploaded a whole load of things I had intended to for quite a while. This is because I had my scanner out to scan a sketch for the new site’s header image:

Among some pretty random old stuff, there were also a couple of concept sketches for my recent Final Year Project:

Website menu buttons in vector:

And a quick scribble of an idea for the idat menu button:

Wine Website Design Samples

5th August, 2009

Here is a better sample of the graphics I have been working on after studying a number of sites suggested by the client as to the style they are looking for.

Individual vine leaf vector graphics:

Project Site Graphics

23rd April, 2009

I have decided to have a separate set of showcase pages for my project, to be used to present information about various aspects. Currently it’s literally just the header design, but this features a wavy line of icons that represent the process: