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A Themer's Cheatsheet

A Quick Refresher of Web Design Fundamentals Right On Your Desktop

I’ve had design coming out my ears the past couple weeks while working on the the designs and themes for DrupalCon DC, DC Bikes, Stumble Safely, and the New America Foundation’s recently launched State of State Health. Working around the clock on theming has been a good reminder of how even veteran Drupal themers can use some brushing up on their fundamentals. Inspired in part by this simple sticky, I put together a wallpaper that includes the reminders and diagrams I found myself needing the most.

Metrics

Should this logo go 10 pixels wider? 50? How big is 100 pixels again? Metrics gives you a quick visual scale of different measurements so you can get on the same page with your teammates about how big that logo really should be.

Fonts

Choosing the right font for that special occasion can be tricky. Here’s a display of the most common web fonts in both Camel Case and UPPERCASE to help you decide what font is right for you.

Color

Color pickers are great, but wouldn’t it be better if you could command RGB hex values on your own? An RGB color wheel reminds you which values you need to achieve different parts of the color spectrum, and a hex value scale helps you blend colors right from your text editor. A palette of 20 trendy colors has been thrown in for reference and good measure.

Shorthand

Keep your CSS tight and simple. A quick reminder of the most used CSS shorthands: backgrounds, fonts, and box model.

Internet Explorer

Last but not least, the best defense against IE is a good offense: don’t write code that IE won’t understand. This short list of CSS and JavaScript pitfalls to avoid will help you minimize your head-scratching, head-banging IE debugging nightmare even if it can’t actually fix everyone’s favorite browser.

The Themer’s Cheatsheet is available for download in several different colors – blue, green, red, and black if you do that. The original SVG has been released to the Public Domain. Enjoy!

http://svn3.cvsdude.com/devseed/sandbox/graphics/themers_cheatsheet

love it. really, this is

love it. really, this is awesome. this is my new desktop lol

The RGB wheel says RG(white)

The RGB wheel says RG(white) B(blank) at south, but according to colors it should say R(white) GB(black). Blessings!

Some things to add maybe?

I love it, but consider adding these things

  • (from morten) X and Y (I get confused sometimes too)
  • margin, border, padding visually
  • borders (in the shorthand)
  • A clock (to remind you that it’s too late)

I don’t do SVG but if I did i’d add those.

Great suggestions dmitri —

Great suggestions dmitri — I’ll see where I can fit those in. Not sure the clock will be too helpful though — I can’t get png images to tell the time — maybe it can just look pretty?

Thanks

The clock was just a joke :-)

Here are two more things (minor)

One is a diff (my first messing around with SVG!) http://pastie.textmate.org/346463

And the other is, how about adding the child selector (.one > .two) to the list of things IE can’t do

Thanks Again!

Very cool! So thoughtful.

Thanks + question about Futura

Thanks for the very nicely designed sheet! It would be great if it’s true, but are you sure Futura is one of the common used webfonts? Is it distributed with windows?

Futura

That’ts a good point — Futura isn’t distributed with Windows but it is quite common on Macs. I’ve found that Century Gothic, which is rather common on Windows machines makes for a good CSS fallback.

An amazing designer...

The DrupalDC website is beautiful AND functional. I work with designers all day long, and I’ve gotta say, Young, you are a very talented individual. This is perhaps one of the best designed conference web sites I’ve seen.

I’ve been making web designer friends (that know nothing about Drupal) take a look at the web site, usually met with “oo’s” and “ahs.”

The top half of your background is VERY useful (the colors esp.). I believe, though, that I will be printing your cheat sheet and posting it next to my monitors when I next theme, viewing the desktop is kinda hard when you’re knee deep in multiple browsers and stylesheets.

Thanks, Josh

small bug

There is a small bug in the color wheel: at cyan you have highlighted “RG”, while it should highlight “GB”.

otherwise: very useful indeed

Thanks! Committed.

Great catch — the change has been committed. I should also say: patches are welcome : )

<tspan id="tspan4162"-           style="fill:#ffffff;fill-opacity:1">R</tspan><tspan+           style="fill:#000000;fill-opacity:1">R</tspan><tspan            id="tspan4164"-           style="fill:#887f78;fill-opacity:1"><tspan-             style="fill:#ffffff;fill-opacity:1"-             id="tspan4166">G</tspan><tspan-             style="fill:#000000;fill-opacity:1"-             id="tspan5073">B</tspan></tspan></tspan></text>+           style="fill:#ffffff;fill-opacity:1">GB</tspan></tspan>

Thank you!

This is a handy desktop background, thank you for making it available.

Thanks!

I love it when people share tools!

Very nice and useful. Even

Very nice and useful. Even for people who need this rarily, people like me :-)