I don’t know about you, but I love me some rounded corners. They just give off a more casual feel than the standard “hard” corners.

I have built several sites that do the whole rounded thing, but I have always done it the hard way by using a bunch of images and such. Why? I have never found a non-image way that gave nearly as clean of a look as an image. At least not until now.

Today I found spiffy corners. Its not a new site (its actually on its second version) so many of you may have already found this little guy, but he is new to me.

For those of you who don’t know about this site, it is a CSS and HTML generator that creates really nice rounded corners that don’t have all the “jaggies” that are so common. The resulting code isn’t too shabby either (which is a feat in and of itself). I tested it on Firefox 2.0.0.3 and IE 6 today and the examples looked great in both.

So if you are creating a site and need some nice looking rounded corners, give this guy a try and send me a link of your site!

So the other day I got a new project. Nothing all that fancy, but the trick was, the company does not have a presence at all…no logo, no previous designs…nothin’. A clean slate.

A lot of designers love this situation. It allows them to be completely creative with no strings attached. Others have a mental coronary and have no idea where to begin. I fall right about in the middle myself. I enjoy the challenge, but that first step is always a doozy.

In this case, the challenge inspired me to keep track of the steps I went through to take a blank slate to a finished design. This article is aimed at beginners, but it will contain a lot of links that may be useful to the hardened vets out there as well.
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So, as of yesterday Microsoft announced at the National Association of Broadcasters conference and through its various blogs that it is now calling WPF/e…wait for it…Silverlight.

Why is this important? The name isn’t, but the technology behind it is. The name simply gives us something much shnazzier to call the WPF/e (that didn’t really roll off the tongue). WPF/e as I mentioned before is the next wave of web technologies courtesy of the guys in Redmond. Releasing the new name is simply the first of many announcements regarding this tech that will be coming over the next few months.
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