Chapter 8

Building Visually Rich Internet Applications

Now that we have a better grasp of what JavaScript and the various mobile oriented JavaScript frameworks can do to enhance our user experience, it is time to dive in and get our hands messy with a bit of digital finger painting. Building awesome web applications isn’t just about programming and logic. A fair amount of web development takes a lot of cues from the design realm. Take CSS, for instance. One of the main reasons why it drives developers crazy is because CSS is a design tool and not really a development tool. Sure, we have to write code to make everything look pretty, but really what we are doing is meticulously setting margins, padding, colors, typefaces, etc.

Keeping that in mind, in this chapter we will explore all of those fun aspects of development that deal more with design. We will take a look at resources for Creative Commons icons and graphics, resources for web fonts, CSS frameworks, and even a nice bitmap and vector graphic editor targeted toward web developers and web designers called Adobe Fireworks (www.adobe.com/products/fireworks.html).