i am a camera my kids are cameras too

I've been following IE and how it relates to web standards for quite some time now. I haven't been all that vocal over the past two years because, mainly, IE has been moving rapidly and in the right direction. For all the progress made, however, Internet Explorer's detractors - many who are fans of the SCOFF Browsersâ„¢ (Safari, Chrome, Opera & Firefox) - are not so much interested in web standards as they are in deriding Microsoft and its products. IE's lack of web standards became a rallying point for them. But times have changed.

Nineteen months ago I wrote how I felt that Expression Studio is a better design value than the comparable Adobe suite. This price disparity still exists more than a year an a half since I wrote it. On Amazon.com, owners of Photoshop can upgrade to CS4 Web Premium for just $1290. Owners of any Expression product can upgrade to Expression Studio 2 for $330.

Fresh off the attention I received for my Vine Type website, Microsoft now spotlights ... me.

Community Spotlight Interview

Expression Design provides several great graphics effects, but one that is sorely missed by me is inner shadow, or inner glow. They're basically the same except inner shadow would be a black glow, I suppose.

I've been using a simple solution to simulate inner shadow by using two rectangle objects and a blur effect and I demonstrate this effect in the following video tutorial. Click on the photo below to view the tutorial.

In preparing for my own design work, I created an Expression Design template for myself based on the Blueprint CSS framework.

There are utilities to customize the Blueprint grid to any number of columns of any width, but I started with the default 24-column grid and created a starting template for my latest project.