Book Image

jQuery for Designers: Beginner's Guide

By : Natalie Maclees
Book Image

jQuery for Designers: Beginner's Guide

By: Natalie Maclees

Overview of this book

jQuery is awesome for designers ñ it builds easily on the CSS and HTML you already know and allows you to create impressive effects with just a few lines of code. However, without a background in programming, JavaScript ñ on which jQuery is built ñ can feel intimidating and impossible to grasp. This book will show you how simple it can be to learn the basics and then extend your capabilities by taking advantage of jQuery plugins.jQuery for Designers offers approachable lessons for designers with little or no background in JavaScript. The book begins by introducing the jQuery library and a small and simple introduction to JavaScript. Then you'll step through a few simple tasks to get your feet wet before diving into using plugins to quickly and simply add complex effects with just a few lines of code.You'll be surprised at how far you can get with JavaScript when you start with the power of the jQuery library and this book will show you how. We'll cover common interface widgets and effects such as tabbed interfaces, custom tooltips, and custom scrollbars. You'll learn how to create an animated navigation menu and how to add simple AJAX effects to enhance your site visitors' experience. Then we'll wrap up with interactive data grids which make sorting and searching data easy.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
jQuery for Designers Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – creating a custom uniform theme


  1. Start off by downloading the theme kit from Pixelmatrix. It's available in the themes section on uniformjs.com:

  2. Unzip the folder and inside you'll find two PSD files—sprite.psd and sprites.psd. Open up sprite.psd in Photoshop and style the form elements to your heart's content. You can change the sizes of the elements if you'd like to have larger or smaller form elements. Sprites.psd is only for explaining what each style is for. You can use it as a reference to make sure you get all the possibilities covered, but you won't actually need to use it to create your theme.

  3. When your sprite is ready, head over to http://uniformjs.com/themer.html.

    Fill out the form with height of your select sprite, the width and height of your checkboxes and radio buttons, and the height of your file input. Then click Generate code. The CSS that you'll need to have Uniform work with your sprite will be generated for you. Copy and paste it into a CSS file and save...