As part of our series on how we built Queued, today we’re going to talk about theming the Queued application, and touch on a few examples of what made putting the skin on Queued so much fun.
The foundation for the beautiful theme for Queued was laid down by colleagues Damon Dimmick and Torrey Rice, and their amazing wireframe and mockup work (respectively) provided the building blocks for laying down Queued’s skin.
The design and styling elements that make up the Web 2.0 mantra have been defined by—among other things—rounded corners, transparency, and drop shadows. These three concepts have been key in many CSS-driven web applications or sites. (For examples of some great CSS-driven work, check out cssvault and cssBeauty.) Following the CSS2 recommendation, for years we’ve been using a combination of code and images to make these types of things possible.
My colleague, Torrey Rice, has touched upon unofficial CSS advancements in Safari 3.1 in his discussion about CSS animations, so I’ll focus on advancements that are part of ongoing CSS3 drafts. While CSS 3 as a whole is much maligned, we can use some of the properties that have already been implemented in today’s browsers with just a few simple lines of CSS. Dijit Themes for the Dojo Tooolkit already take advantage of these enhancements where it makes sense. Of course, you can also customize or write your own theme taking advantage of CSS3 wherever possible.