5 tutorials to web design, the apple.com way
Posted by jbj on Sep 2, 2008 in Web design • 11 commentsIn terms of web design, Apple.com is a very good exemple of clean semantic code and stunning graphics. Here’s 5 high quality tutorials to design like apple.com and recreate Apple’s menubar, breadcrumbs, stylesheets…
Apple style Accordion Menu

Let's start with a nice tutorial from DynamicDrive. Remember that post where I shown you 10 javascript sliders? Here's another great way to display your content: This menu mimics the look of the vertical menu found on certain areas of Apple.com. The headers are toggled via "mouseover" over each one, and the previous expanded header (if any) is closed before expanding the current.
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Recreate Apple.com menubar

Apple.com menubar mixes clean code and very cool design. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to recreate Apple’s website navigation bar and study the techniques used.
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Apple.com CSS image replacement

This CSS technique is used on many websites, but as usual, apple.com do it very well. There's many different way to replace a text by an image using css, but in my opinion, the following code is the best way to do it:
h2 {
background: url(itunes_main_title20080609.gif) no-repeat;
height: 60px;
text-indent: -9999px;
overflow: hidden;
color: #000;
font-size: 22px;
margin: 52px 0 10px 0;
}
Did you noticied the text-indent:-9999px; and the overflow:hidden; ? This is the key. It allows us to visually hide the text without ruining our SEO.
Create apple.com-like breadcrumb using simple CSS

In this great tutorial, Janko Jovanovic will show you how to create a apple-like breadcrumb. If you're a WordPress user, don't forget our tutorial for adding breadcrumbs to your WordPress theme.
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Apple.com stylesheet anatomy

You know it: Apple is one of the coolest brand names in technology, so no wonder their site should adhere to modern web design standards. Divs, classes, no tables, media types, ajax libraries, separated stylesheets, extensive code organization, interesting varying layouts, it's all there for you to learn from.
In this very interesting article, German developper Reinhold Weber analyses apple.com stylesheets anatomy. A must read!
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Great list. The “Apple.com CSS image replacement” is fantastic! I’m going to use that on my site today!
Having been using Mac platform for long enough, I couldn’t help to say how happy I am to discover these awesome design gems. Thanks for sharing it with us.
Yan
You’re welcome, guys! Glad to see that you enjoyed this post
Thank you for this list! You can never have enough good quality tutorials and this adds to my list.
frank
Thanks for adding my article to this great list! I’ll have to check out other four articles.
Hey Janko, you’re welcome. Your tutorial is great, just as your blog!
A great compilation there. I am about to go look into the breadcrumbs and accordion menu, should help with a design I am working on. Thanks.
thanks so much,
i wonder, how to make an “apple style” search, just like in the apple store