After many struggles with trying to work with someone else's html, I finally have something worth showing for my css zen garden. Its less extravagant then my original design.. as I had some troubles with not having many extra divs. Feedback welcome! 

http://jgillis.aisites.com/csszengarden/

The second part of the assignment for this week was working with http://lessframework.com/. I created an example of how this framework can help your site when designing for multiple devices. When you resize the screen, the divs move accordingly. 

http://jgillis.aisites.com/lessframework/

Here is the start to my CSS Zen Garden project. Here is a link to my rough wireframe sketches.

http://jgillis.aisites.com//wireframes/wireframes.pdf

Here is a link to the tutorial I put together to present to the class.

http://jgillis.aisites.com//tutorial/CSS3RibbonTutorial.pdf

It is about making ribbons on pages using only css. The tutorial came from:

http://www.pvmgarage.com/2010/01/how-to-create-depth-and-nice-3d-ribbons-only-using-css3/ 

Multiple backgrounds

This week was all about multiple backgrounds and google fonts. Our homework was to read the chapter and try out using multiple backgrounds. I decided to just use the material they gave us to show that I understand multiple backgrounds. I also chose different typefaces from google fonts and linked them to my page. Finally, I uploaded it to my ai campus server. I found this pretty simple to complete and I'm excited to use it on my webpage! :)

http://jgillis.aisites.com/notebook_paper/paper_start.html

Stunning CSS3 - Rounded corners etc.

I found this chapter in the Stunning CSS3 book to be very rewarding! I understood the rounded corners right away. I also found this site which is very helpful:

http://border-radius.com/

As I continued through the chapter things became more challenging but I still got it right eventually. I thought making the triangle was the most interesting. The gradients were also very easy to figure out how to make them work.

I've also been experimenting with different text edit programs other then just dreamweaver. I used espresso (http://macrabbit.com/espresso/) and found the interface easier to use then dreamweaver. I think I will using it more in the future! Now that I've seen how CSS can do some cool things I'm excited to get started on a design of my own.

Print Style Sheet

Print style sheets are crazy things. I thought it was interesting to learn how people do that. I never realized that code had to be written for when the print option to work. 

I understood how it worked right away, it was just making it work which was the problem! We had the css style sheet all right and couldn't figure out what was going on. Finally, after comparing code with many other classmates, we learned that the file wasn't linked properly in the html. Problems solved! 

Overall, print style sheets are very useful when designing webpages. 

Design Tip

Here is my design tip:

Use lots of white space