Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS

Chapter 3. Preparing Your Design for Construction

When building the graphic comp of your flexible layout (likely in a program like Adobe Fireworks or Adobe Photoshop), you’ll need to keep in mind all the design elements you learned about in Chapter 2. You’ll use the comp to give you an idea of what the finished page will look like, as well as to create graphic slices from it to use as foreground or background images in the page. How you set up and work with this comp—the canvas size you choose, your use of layers, how you slice it, and so on—affect how easily you can turn it into flexible (X)HTML and CSS.

Setting up Your Graphic Comp

Graphic comps are static images, not moving, user-controlled, flexible web pages. They can only go so far in approximating ...