Chapter 8. Transparency and Shadow

Image

“Honesty and transparency make you vulnerable. Be honest and transparent anyway.”

—Mother Teresa

For practical purposes, let’s think of pixels as squares. Images made up of these square building blocks can only have edges with right angles, and can only have smooth-looking edges when they’re rectangles. Working with rectangles leads to boxy layouts.

Web designers use transparency to break out of this boring, boxy mentality; with transparency, they can fake many things they normally can’t have, like round and custom image shapes that rest on background colors in the browser.

Creating Transparency with GIFs

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