rowid,title,contents,year,author,author_slug,published,url,topic
131,Random Lines Made With Mesh,"I know that Adobe Illustrator can be a bit daunting for people who aren’t really advanced users of the program, but you would be amazed by how easy you can create cool effects or backgrounds. In this short tutorial I show you how to create a cool looking background only in 5 steps. 

Step 1 – Create Lines



Create lines using random widths and harmonious suitable colors. If you get stuck on finding the right colors, check out Adobe’s Kuler and start experimenting.

Step 2 – Convert Strokes to Fills



Select all lines and convert them to fills. Go to the Object menu, select Path > Outline Stroke. Select the Rectangle tool and draw 1 big rectangle on top the lines. Give the rectangle a suitable color. With the rectangle still selected, go to the Object menu, select Arrange > Send to Back.

Step 3 – Convert to Mesh



Select all objects by pressing the command key (for Mac users), control key (for Windows users) + the “a” key. Go to the Object menu and select the Envelope Distort > Make with Mesh option. Enter 2 rows and 2 columns. Check the preview box to see what happens and click the OK button.

Step 4 – Play Around with The Mesh Points 



Play around with the points of the mesh using the Direct Selection tool (the white arrow in the Toolbox). Click on the top right point of the mesh. Once you’re starting to drag hold down the shift key and move the point upwards. 



Now start dragging the bezier handles on the mesh to achieve the effect as shown in the above picture. Of course you can try out all kind of different effects here. 

The Final Result



This is an example of how the final result can look. You can try out all kinds of different shapes dragging the handles of the mesh points. This is just one of the many results you can get. So next time you haven’t got inspiration for a background of a header, a banner or whatever, just experiment with a few basic shapes such as lines and try out the ‘Envelope Distort’ options in Illustrator or the ‘Make with Mesh’ option and experiment, you’ll be amazed by the unexpected creative results.",2006,Veerle Pieters,veerlepieters,2006-12-08T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2006/random-lines-made-with-mesh/,design
133,Gravity-Defying Page Corners,"While working on Stikkit, a “page curl” came to be.
Not being as crafty as Veerle, you see.
I fired up Photoshop to see what could be.
“Another copy is running on the network“ … oopsie.

With license issues sorted out and a concept in mind
I set out to create something flexible and refined.
One background image and code that is sure to be lean.
A simple solution for lazy people like me.

The curl I’ll be showing isn’t a curl at all.
It’s simply a gradient that’s 18 pixels tall.
With a fade to the left that’s diagonally aligned
and a small fade on the right that keeps the illusion defined.



Create a selection with the marquee tool (keeping in mind a reasonable minimum width) and drag a gradient (black to transparent) from top to bottom.



Now drag a gradient (the background color of the page to transparent) from the bottom left corner to the top right corner.



Finally, drag another gradient from the right edge towards the center, about 20 pixels or so.

But the top is flat and can be positioned precisely
just under the bottom right edge very nicely.
And there it will sit, never ever to be busted
by varying sizes of text when adjusted.

<div id=""page"">
	<div id=""page-contents"">
		<h2>Gravity-Defying!</h2>
		<p>Lorem ipsum dolor ...</p>
	</div>
</div>

Let’s dive into code and in the markup you’ll see
“is that an extra div?” … please don’t kill me?
The #page div sets the width and bottom padding
whose height is equal to the shadow we’re adding.



The #page-contents div will set padding in ems
to scale with the text size the user intends.
The background color will be added here too
but not overlapping the shadow where #page’s padding makes room.

A simple technique that you may find amusing
is to substitute a PNG for the GIF I was using.
For that would be crafty and future-proof, too.
The page curl could sit on any background hue.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this easy little trick.
It’s hardly earth-shattering, and arguably slick.
But it could come in handy, you just never know.
Happy Holidays! And pleasant dreams of web three point oh.",2006,Dan Cederholm,dancederholm,2006-12-24T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2006/gravity-defying-page-corners/,design
134,Photographic Palettes,"How many times have you seen a colour combination that just worked, a match so perfect that it just seems obvious? 

Now, how many times do you come up with those in your own work? A perfect palette looks easy when it’s done right, but it’s often maddeningly difficult and time-consuming to accomplish.

Choosing effective colour schemes will always be more art than science, but there are things you can do that will make coming up with that oh-so-smooth palette just a little a bit easier. A simple trick that can lead to incredibly gratifying results lies in finding a strong photograph and sampling out particularly harmonious colours.

Photo Selection

Not all photos are created equal. You certainly want to start with imagery that fits the eventual tone you’re attempting to create. A well-lit photo of flowers might lead to a poor colour scheme for a funeral parlour’s web site, for example. It’s worth thinking about what you’re trying to say in advance, and finding a photo that lends itself to your message.

As a general rule of thumb, photos that have a lot of neutral or de-saturated tones with one or two strong colours make for the best palette; bright and multi-coloured photos are harder to derive pleasing results from. Let’s start with a relatively neutral image.

Sampling



In the above example, I’ve surrounded the photo with three different background colours directly sampled from the photo itself. Moving from left to right, you can see how each of the sampled colours is from an area of increasingly smaller coverage within the photo, and yet there’s still a strong harmony between the photo and the background image. I don’t really need to pick the big obvious colours from the photo to create that match, I can easily concentrate on more interesting colours that might work better for what I intend.

Using a similar palette, let’s apply those colour choices to a more interesting layout:



In this mini-layout, I’ve re-used the same tan colour from the previous middle image as a background, and sampled out a nicely matching colour for the top and bottom overlays, as well as the two different text colours. Because these colours all fall within a narrow range, the overall balance is harmonious.

What if I want to try something a little more daring? I have a photo of stacked chairs of all different colours, and I’d like to use a few more of those. No problem, provided I watch my colour contrast:



Though it uses varying shades of red, green, and yellow, this palette actually works because the values are even, and the colours muted. Placing red on top of green is usually a hideous combination of death, but if the green is drab enough and the red contrasts well enough, the result can actually be quite pleasing. I’ve chosen red as my loudest colour in this palette, and left green and yellow to play the quiet supporting roles.

Obviously, there are no hard and fast rules here. You might not want to sample absolutely every colour in your scheme from a photo. There are times where you’ll need a variation that’s just a little bit lighter, or a blue that’s not in the photo. You might decide to start from a photo base and tweak, or add in colours of your own. That’s okay too.

Tonal Variations

I’ll leave you with a final trick I’ve been using lately, a way to bring a bit more of a formula into the equation and save some steps.



Starting with the same base palette I sampled from the chairs, in the above image I’ve added a pair of overlaying squares that produce tonal variations of each primary. The lighter variation is simply a solid white square set to 40% opacity, the darker one is a black square at 20%. That gives me a highlight and shadow for each colour, which would prove handy if I had to adapt this colour scheme to a larger layout.

I could add a few more squares of varying opacities, or adjust the layer blending modes for different effects, but as this looks like a great place to end, I’ll leave that up to your experimental whims. Happy colouring!",2006,Dave Shea,daveshea,2006-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2006/photographic-palettes/,design
137,Cheating Color,"Have you ever been strapped to use specific colors outlined in a branding guide? Felt restricted because those colors ended up being too light or dark for the way you want to use them?

Here’s the solution: throw out your brand guide.

gasp!

OK, don’t throw it out. Just put it in a drawer for a few minutes.

Branding Guides be Damned

When dealing with color on screen, it’s easy to get caught up in literal values from hex colors, you can cheat colors ever so slightly to achieve the right optical value. This is especially prevalent when trying to bring a company’s identity colors to a screen design. Because the most important idea behind a brand guide is to help a company maintain the visual integrity of their business, consider hex numbers to be guidelines rather than law. Once you are familiar enough with the colors your company uses, you can start to flex them a bit, and take a few liberties.

This is a quick method for cheating to get the color you really want. With a little sleight of design, we can swap a color that might be part of your identity guidelines, with one that works better optically, and no one will be the wiser!

Color is a Wily Beast

This might be hard: You might have to break out of the idea that a color can only be made using one method. Color is fluid. It interacts and changes based on its surroundings. Some colors can appear lighter or darker based on what color they appear on or next to. The RGB gamut is additive color, and as such, has a tendency to push contrast in the direction that objects may already be leaning—increasing the contrast of light colors on dark colors and decreasing the contrast of light on light. Obviously, because we are talking about monitors here, these aren’t hard and fast rules.

Cheat and Feel Good About It

On a light background, when you have a large element of a light color, a small element of the same color will appear lighter.

Enter our fake company: Double Dagger. They manufacture footnotes. Take a look at Fig. 1 below. The logo (Double Dagger), rule, and small text are all #6699CC. Because the logo so large, we get a good sense of the light blue color. Unfortunately, the rule and small text beneath it feel much lighter because we can’t create enough contrast with such small shapes in that color.

Now take a look at Fig. 2. Our logo is still #6699CC, but now the rule and smaller text have been cheated to #4477BB, effectively giving us the same optical color that we used in the logo. You will find that we get a better sense of the light blue, and the added benefit of more contrast for our text. Doesn’t that feel good?



Conversely, when you have a large element of a dark color, a small element of the same color will appear darker.

Let’s look at Fig. 3 below. Double Dagger has decided to change its identity colors from blue to red. In Fig. 3, our logo, rule, and small text are all #330000, a very dark red. If you look at the rule and small text below the logo, you will notice that they seem dark enough to be confused with black. The dark red can’t be sustained by the smaller shapes. Now let’s look at Fig. 4. The logo is still #33000, but we’ve now cheated the rule and smaller text to #550000. This gives us a better sense of a red, but preserves the dark and moody direction the company has taken.



But we’ve only touched on color against a white background. For colors against a darker background, you may find lighter colors work fine, but darker colors need to be cheated a bit to the lighter side in order to reach a good optical equivalent. Take a look below at Fig. 5 and Fig. 6. Both use the same exact corresponding colors as Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 above, but now they are set against a dark background. Where the blue used in Fig. 1 above was too light for the smaller elements, we find it is just right for them in Fig. 5, and the darker blue we used in Fig. 2 has now proven too dark for a dark background, as evidenced in Fig. 6.



Your mileage may vary, and this may not be applicable in all situations, but consider it to be just another tool on your utility belt for dealing with color problems.",2006,Jason Santa Maria,jasonsantamaria,2006-12-23T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2006/cheating-color/,design
140,Styling hCards with CSS,"There are plenty of places online where you can learn about using the hCard microformat to mark up contact details at your site (there are some resources at the end of the article). But there’s not yet been a lot of focus on using microformats with CSS. So in this installment of 24 ways, we’re going to look at just that – how microformats help make CSS based styling simpler and more logical.

Being rich, quite complex structures, hCards provide designers with a sophisticated scaffolding for styling them. A recent example of styling hCards I saw, playing on the business card metaphor, was by Andy Hume, at http://thedredge.org/2005/06/using-hcards-in-your-blog/. While his approach uses fixed width cards, let’s take a look at how we might style a variable width business card style for our hCards.

Let’s take a common hCard, which includes address, telephone and email details

<div class=""vcard"">
	<p class=""fn org"">Web Directions North
		<a href=""http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/get-vcard.php?uri=http://north.webdirections.org/contact/"">
			<img src=""images/vcard-add.png"" alt=""download vcard icon""></a>
	</p>

	
		 1485 Laperrière Avenue 
		 Ottawa  ON  K1Z 7S8 
		Canada
	

	
		Phone/Fax: Work: 61 2 9365 5007
		Email: info@webdirections.org
	


We’ll be using a variation on the now well established “sliding doors” technique (if you create a CSS technique, remember it’s very important to give it a memorable name or acronym, and bonus points if you get your name in there!) by Douglas Bowman, enhanced by Scott Schiller (see http://www.schillmania.com/projects/dialog/,) which will give us a design which looks like this



The technique, in a nutshell, uses background images on four elements, two at the top, and two at the bottom, to add each rounded corner.

We are going to make this design “fluid” in the sense that it grows and shrinks in proportion with the size of the font that the text of the element is displayed with. This is sometimes referred to as an “em driven design” (we’ll see why in a moment).

To see how this works in practice, here’s the same design with the text “zoomed” up in size



and the same design again, when we zoom the text size down



By the way, the hCard image comes from Chris Messina, and you can download it and other microformat icons from the microformats wiki.

Now, with CSS3, this whole task would be considerably easier, because we can add multiple background images to an element, and border images for each edge of an element. Safari, version 1.3 up, actually supports multiple background images, but sadly, it’s not supported in Firefox 1.5, or even Firefox 2.0 (let’s not mention IE7 eh?). So it’s probably too little supported to use now. So instead we’ll use a technique that only involves CSS2, and works in pretty much any browser.

Very often, developers add div or span elements as containers for these background images, and in fact, if you visit Scott Shiller’s site, that’s what he has done there. But if at all possible we shouldn’t be adding any HTML simply for presentational purposes, even if the presentation is done via CSS. What we can do is to use the HTML we have already, as much as is possible, to add the style we want. This can take some creative thinking, but once you get the hang of this approach it becomes a more natural way of using HTML compared with simply adding divs and spans at will as hooks for style. Of course, this technique isn’t always simple, and in fact sometimes simply not possible, requiring us to add just a little HTML to provide the “hooks” for CSS.

Let’s go to work

The first step is to add a background image to the whole vCard element.



We make this wide enough (for example 1000 or more pixels) and tall enough that no matter how large the content of the vCard grows, it will never overflow this area. We can’t simply repeat the image, because the top left corner will show when the image repeats.

We add this as the background image of the vCard element using CSS.

While we are at it, let’s give the text a sans-serif font, some color so that it will be visible, and stop the image repeating.

.vcard {
	background-image: url(images/vcardfill.png);
	background-repeat: no-repeat;
	color: #666;
	font-family: ""Lucida Grande"", Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
}

Which in a browser, will look something like this.



Next step we need to add the top right hand corner of the hCard. In keeping with our aim of not adding HTML simply for styling purposes, we want to use the existing structure of the page where possible. Here, we’ll use the paragraph of class fn and org, which is the first child element of the vcard element.

<p class=""fn org"">Web Directions Conference Pty Ltd <img src=""images/vcard-add.png"" alt=""download vcard icon""></p>

Here’s our CSS for this element

.fn {
	background-image: url(images/topright.png);
	background-repeat: no-repeat;
	background-position: top right;
	padding-top: 2em;
	font-weight: bold;
	font-size: 1.1em;
}

Again, we don’t want it to repeat, but this time, we’ve specified a background position for the image. This will make the background image start from the top, but its right edge will be located at the right edge of the element. I also made the font size a little bigger, and the weight bold, to differentiate it from the rest of the text in the hCard.

Here’s the image we are adding as the background to this element.



So, putting these two CSS statements together we get



We specified a padding-top of 2em to give some space between the content of the fn element and the edge of the fn element. Otherwise the top of the hCard image would be hard against the border. To see this in action, just remove the padding-top: 2em; declaration and preview in a browser.

So, with just two statements, we are well under way. We’ve not even had to add any HTML so far. Let’s turn to the bottom of the element, and add the bottom border (well, the background image which will serve as that border).

Now, which element are we going to use to add this background image to?

OK, here I have to admit to a little, teensie bit of cheating. If you look at the HTML of the hCard, I’ve grouped the email and telephone properties into a div, with a class of telecommunications. This grouping is not strictly requred for our hCard.

<div class=""telecommunications"">
	<p class=""tel"">Phone/Fax: <span class=""tel""><span class=""type"">Work</span>:
		<span class=""value"">61 2 9365 5007</span></p>
	<p class=""email"">Email: <a class=""value"" href=""mailto:info@webdirections.org"">info@webdirections.org</a></p>
</div>

Now, I chose that class name because that is what the vCard specification calls this group of properties. And typically, I do tend to group together related elements using divs when I  mark up content. I find it makes the page structure more logical and readable. But strictly speaking, this isn’t necessary, so you may consider it cheating. But my lesson in this would be, if you are going to add markup, try to make it as meaningful as possible.

As you have probably guessed by now, we are going to add one part of the bottom border image to this element. We’re going to add this image as the background-image.



Again, it will be a very wide image, like the top left one, so that no matter how wide the element might get, the background image will still be wide enough. Now, we’ll need to make this image sit in the bottom left of the element we attach it to, so we use a backgound position of left bottom (we put the horizontal position before the vertical). Here’s our CSS statement for this

.telecommunications {
	background-image: url(images/bottom-left.png);
	background-repeat: no-repeat;
	background-position: left bottom;
	margin-bottom: 2em;
}

And that will look like this



Not quite there, but well on the way. Time for the final piece in the puzzle.

OK, I admit, I might have cheated just a little bit more in this step. But like the previous step, all valid, and (hopefully) quite justifiable markup. If we look at the HTML again, you’ll find that our email address is marked up like this

<p class=""email"">Email: <a class=""value"" href=""mailto:info@webdirections.org"">info@webdirections.org</a></p>

Typically, in hCard, the value part of this property isn’t required, and we could get away with

<a class=""email"" href=""mailto:info@webdirections.org"">info@webdirections.org</a>

The form I’ve used, with the span of class value is however, perfectly valid hCard markup (hard allows for multiple email addresses of different types, which is where this typically comes in handy). Why have I gone to all this trouble? Well, when it came to styling the hCard, I realized I needed a block element to attach the background image for the bottom right hand corner to. Typically the last block element in the containing element is the ideal choice (and sometimes it’s possible to take an inline element, for example the link here, and use CSS to make it a block element, and attach it to that, but that really doesn’t work with this design).

So, if we are going to use the paragraph which contains the email link, we need a way to select it exclusively, which means that with CSS2 at least, we need a class or id as a hook for our CSS selector (in CSS3 we could use the last-child selector, which selects the last child element of a specified element, but again, as last child is not widely supported, we won’t rely on it here.)

So, the least worst thing we could do is take an existing element, and add some reasonably meaningful markup to it. That’s why we gave the paragraph a class of email, and the email address a class of value. Which reminds me a little of a moment in Hamlet


	The lady doth protest too much, methinks


OK, let’s get back to the CSS.

We add the bottom right corner image, positioning it in the bottom right of the element, and making sure it doesn’t repeat. We also add some padding to the bottom, to balance out the padding we added to the top of the hCard.

p.email {
	background-image: url(images/bottom-right.png);
	background-position: right bottom;
	background-repeat: no-repeat;
	padding-bottom: 2em;
}

Which all goes to make our hCard look like this



It just remains for us to clean up a little.

Let’s start from the top. We’ll float the download image to the right like this

.vcard img {
	float: right;
	padding-right: 1em;
	margin-top: -1em
}

See how we didn’t have to add a class to style the image, we used the  fact that the image is a descendent of the vcard element, and a descendent selector. In my experience, the very widely supported, powerful descendent selector is one of the most underused aspects of CSS. So if you don’t use it frequently, look into it in more detail.

We added some space to the right of the image, and pulled it up a bit closer to the top of the hCard, like this



We also want to add some whitespace between the edge of the hCard and the text. We would typically add padding to the left of the containing element, (in this case the vcard element) but this would break our bottom left hand corner, like this



That’s because the div element we added this bottom left background image to would be moved in by the padding on its containing element.

So instead, we add left margin to all the paragraphs in the hCard

.vcard p {
	margin-left: 1em;
}

(there is the descendent selector again – it is the swiss army knife of CSS)

Now, we’ve not yet made the width of the hCard a function of the size of the text inside it (or “em driven” as we described it earlier). We do this by giving the hCard a width that is specified in em units. Here we’ll set a width of say 28em, which makes the hCard always roughly as wide as 28 characters (strictly speaking 28 times the width of the letter capital M). 

So the statement for our containing vcard element becomes

.vcard {
	background-image: url(images/vcardfill.png);
	background-repeat: no-repeat;
	color: #666;
	font-family: ""Lucida Grande"", Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
	width: 28em;
}

and now our element will look like this



We’ve used almost entirely the existing HTML from our original hCard (adding just a little, and trying as much as possible to keep that additional markup meaningful), and just 6 CSS statements.

Holiday Bonus – a downloadable vCard

Did you notice this part of the HTML

<a href=""http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/get-vcard.php?uri=http://north.webdirections.org/contact/"">
        <img src=""images/vcard-add.png"" alt=""download vcard icon""></a>

What’s with the odd looking url

<a href=""http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/get-vcard.php?uri=http://north.webdirections.org/contact/""

If you click the link, X2V, a nifty web service from Brian Suda, grabs the page at the URL, and if it finds a hCard, converts it to a vCard, and depending on how your system is setup, automatically downloads it and adds it to your address book (Mac OS X) or prompts you whether you’d like to save the vCard and add it to whatever application is the default vCard handler on your system. 

What X2V does is take the actual HTML of your hCard, and with the magic of XSLT, converts it to a vCard. So, by simply marking up contact details using hCard, and adding a link like this, you automatically get downloadable vCard – and if you change your contact details, and update the hCard, there’s no vCard file to update as well.

Technorati also have a similar service at http://technorati.com/contact so you might want to use that if you expect any kind of load, as they can probably afford the bandwidth more than Brian!

If you want to play with the HTML and CSS for this design, the code and images can be downloaded.

Hope you enjoyed this, and found it useful. If so, you might like to check out my microformats focussed blog, or get along to Web Directions North, where I’ll be speaking along with Dan Cederholmn and Tantek Çelik in a 2 hour session focussed solely on microformats. And keep an eye out for my microformats book, from which this article has been adapted, coming in the spring of 2007.

A happy festive season, and all the best for 2007

John

Some hCard links


	The hCard entry at microformats.org
	The hCard Creator
	The hCard cheatsheet
	The hCard FAQ
	Ideas for authoring hCards



	Microfomatique – a blog about microformats
	Web Directions North – featuring a full 2 hour focussed microformats session",2006,John Allsopp,johnallsopp,2006-12-14T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2006/styling-hcards-with-css/,design
141,Compose to a Vertical Rhythm,"“Space in typography is like time in music. It is infinitely divisible, but a few proportional intervals can be much more useful than a limitless choice of arbitrary quantities.” So says the typographer Robert Bringhurst, and just as regular use of time provides rhythm in music, so regular use of space provides rhythm in typography, and without rhythm the listener, or the reader, becomes disorientated and lost.

On the Web, vertical rhythm – the spacing and arrangement of text as the reader descends the page – is contributed to by three factors: font size, line height and margin or padding. All of these factors must calculated with care in order that the rhythm is maintained. 

The basic unit of vertical space is line height. Establishing a suitable line height that can be applied to all text on the page, be it heading, body copy or sidenote, is the key to a solid dependable vertical rhythm, which will engage and guide the reader down the page. To see this in action, I’ve created an example with headings, footnotes and sidenotes. 

Establishing a suitable line height

The easiest place to begin determining a basic line height unit is with the font size of the body copy. For the example I’ve chosen 12px. To ensure readability the body text will almost certainly need some leading, that is to say spacing between the lines. A line-height of 1.5em would give 6px spacing between the lines of body copy. This will create a total line height of 18px, which becomes our basic unit. Here’s the CSS to get us to this point:

body {
	font-size: 75%; 
}
html>body {
	font-size: 12px; 
}
p {
	line-height 1.5em; 
}

There are many ways to size text in CSS and the above approach provides and accessible method of achieving the pixel-precision solid typography requires. By way of explanation, the first font-size reduces the body text from the 16px default (common to most browsers and OS set-ups) down to the 12px we require. This rule is primarily there for Internet Explorer 6 and below on Windows: the percentage value means that the text will scale predictably should a user bump the text size up or down. The second font-size sets the text size specifically and is ignored by IE6, but used by Firefox, Safari, IE7, Opera and other modern browsers which allow users to resize text sized in pixels.

Spacing between paragraphs

With our rhythmic unit set at 18px we need to ensure that it is maintained throughout the body copy. A common place to lose the rhythm is the gaps set between margins. The default treatment by web browsers of paragraphs is to insert a top- and bottom-margin of 1em. In our case this would give a spacing between the paragraphs of 12px and hence throw the text out of rhythm. If the rhythm of the page is to be maintained, the spacing of paragraphs should be related to the basic line height unit. This is achieved simply by setting top- and bottom-margins equal to the line height.

In order that typographic integrity is maintained when text is resized by the user we must use ems for all our vertical measurements, including line-height, padding and margins.

p {
	font-size:1em;
	margin-top: 1.5em;
	margin-bottom: 1.5em; 
}

Browsers set margins on all block-level elements (such as headings, lists and blockquotes) so a way of ensuring that typographic attention is paid to all such elements is to reset the margins at the beginning of your style sheet. You could use a rule such as:

body,div,dl,dt,dd,ul,ol,li,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,pre,form,fieldset,p,blockquote,th,td {  
	margin:0; 
	padding:0; 
}

Alternatively you could look into using the Yahoo! UI Reset style sheet which removes most default styling, so providing a solid foundation upon which you can explicitly declare your design intentions.

Variations in text size

When there is a change in text size, perhaps with a heading or sidenotes, the differing text should also take up a multiple of the basic leading. This means that, in our example, every diversion from the basic text size should take up multiples of 18px. This can be accomplished by adjusting the line-height and margin accordingly, as described following.

Headings

Subheadings in the example page are set to 14px. In order that the height of each line is 18px, the line-height should be set to 18 ÷ 14 = 1.286. Similarly the margins above and below the heading must be adjusted to fit. The temptation is to set heading margins to a simple 1em, but in order to maintain the rhythm, the top and bottom margins should be set at 1.286em so that the spacing is equal to the full 18px unit.

h2 {
	font-size:1.1667em;
	line-height: 1.286em;
	margin-top: 1.286em;
	margin-bottom: 1.286em; 
}

One can also set asymmetrical margins for headings, provided the margins combine to be multiples of the basic line height. In our example, a top margin of 1½ lines is combined with a bottom margin of half a line as follows:

h2 {
	font-size:1.1667em;
	line-height: 1.286em;
	margin-top: 1.929em;
	margin-bottom: 0.643em; 
}

Also in our example, the main heading is given a text size of 18px, therefore the line-height has been set to 1em, as has the margin:

h1 {
	font-size:1.5em;
	line-height: 1em;
	margin-top: 0;
	margin-bottom: 1em; 
}

Sidenotes

Sidenotes (and other supplementary material) are often set at a smaller size to the basic text. To keep the rhythm, this smaller text should still line up with body copy, so a calculation similar to that for headings is required. In our example, the sidenotes are set at 10px and so their line-height must be increased to 18 ÷ 10 = 1.8.

.sidenote {
	font-size:0.8333em;
	line-height:1.8em; 
}

Borders

One additional point where vertical rhythm is often lost is with the introduction of horizontal borders. These effectively act as shims pushing the subsequent text downwards, so a two pixel horizontal border will throw out the vertical rhythm by two pixels. A way around this is to specify horizontal lines using background images or, as in our example, specify the width of the border in ems and adjust the padding to take up the slack. 

The design of the footnote in our example requires a 1px horizontal border. The footnote contains 12px text, so 1px in ems is 1 ÷ 12 = 0.0833. I have added a margin of 1½ lines above the border (1.5 × 18 ÷ 12 = 2.5ems), so to maintain the rhythm the border + padding must equal a ½ (9px). We know the border is set to 1px, so the padding must be set to 8px. To specify this in ems we use the familiar calculation: 8 ÷ 12 = 0.667.

Hit me with your rhythm stick

Composing to a vertical rhythm helps engage and guide the reader down the page, but it takes typographic discipline to do so. It may seem like a lot of fiddly maths is involved (a few divisions and multiplications never hurt anyone) but good type setting is all about numbers, and it is this attention to detail which is the key to success.",2006,Richard Rutter,richardrutter,2006-12-12T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2006/compose-to-a-vertical-rhythm/,design