CSS3 has a lot of great features too, but it doesn't have quite the power that illustrator's Graphical Styles can achieve. Lets say you want system text to mirror the text styles of a dollar bill:

Sadly, there is no easy way to accomplish this, but I have a solution I've been working on that degrades pretty gracefully and doesn't require any scripts to run. I've nicknamed it "Afterburning", and the idea is simple: Copy the text behind the element, offset it slightly, and apply a background image over for masking.

There are a few tricks being used:

1. A new element is created using the CSS :before pseudo-element, this works in most modern browsers, but is ignored by IE, therefore the text looks normal when it isn't supported.
2. We cannot access and copy the text directly out of the element using CSS, but we can access any attributes that element has using content: attr();. In most cases, the "title" attribute isn't widely used for a header element, so we can copy the text content into this area for our :before CSS rule. The only side effect will be a tooltip when you hover over the text. If that is an issue, use the newly implemented "data-" attributes discussed here.
3. The image can be a transparent PNG or GIF (Animated for that matter), as long as the color matches the background of the header. Sadly, this is one of the issues with using this method, you'll need a solid color in the background for the effect to work.
4. I also added a slight outline to the text with a white CSS shadow. This adds a slight border to separate the text from the hatched-shadow.
5. You may need to adjust the line-height or padding of the header element to ensure the background covers the duplicated element.

As with any modern filter, I wouldn't recommend it until CSS3 is more widely used. Nonetheless, small little flairs like these reward your users for browsing with the newest standards, while keeping your website content easy to update.

W3C Browser Stats – 7.1%

Stat Owl – 10.45%

Stat Counter – 6.62%

"According to web analytics company StatCounter, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 is now truly a relic of the past with less than 5% of market share in the U.S. and Europe."

Educate them on what they're missing and create a simplified version.

The tiny text says:

Oops! It looks like you’re using an old version of Internet Explorer to browse the Internet. 
Our site will work just fine for you, but it will look much prettier if you take a moment to upgrade your browser.
Don’t worry – upgrading only takes a second, it won’t damage your computer, and you won’t lose any files. Best of all, you’ll probably find lots of other web sites load faster and look better after you switch.
You can upgrade directly from Microsoft here or just remove this warning.

Well played Bluesky, well played.

Too often, that is the case with agencies and their self-promotion tools. Especially their websites.  We preach day-in and day-out to our clients about the critical importance of fresh, relevant online content. So, what’s our excuse?

The truth is, we don’t have one.

Granted, when you spend weeks, even months or more building (among other things) websites for some of the nation's greatest brands, it can be a challenge to do one for yourself. Especially one that is a true reflection of the agency’s thinking, passion, abilities, and innovation. Add to that the agency’s typical collective inability to come to consensus on design, content, and case studies. It can be the perfect recipe for a classic agency disaster—over budget, missed deadline, outdated content the day after it launches, and so on.

We’re striving to break that trend.  We want our kids to have great shoes.

We’re proud to launch www.planitagency.com for so many reasons:

•  It offers us the opportunity to showcase our abilities as an industry-leading agency not only with design, but with functionality and content as well.
•  We’re proud to showcase our clients’ work (and our work on their behalf)
•  We strive to lead by example. Play around our new site and you’ll find that this website is so much more than just a website; it leverages the talents of our whole agency, from strategy to creative to PR to search to social media…
•  It puts our money where our mouth is by demonstrating how RELEVANT content is really king—how we have a responsibility to share content, opinions, thought leadership, ideas, complaints, even recommendations to our peers. In real time. Honest and unedited.
•  It offers a forum for us to entertain, inform, and include our friends, peers, clients, and prospects.
•  It makes concrete our passion to open the eyes of current and potential clients to the power of an integrated communications strategy.
•  It gives new friends a peek inside Planit (and therefore inside our culture) to learn about what it takes to be a member of the Planit team—because people hire people, not PowerPoints or RFP responses.

If we do our job right, this site doesn’t get old. I challenge my team to be sure it doesn’t have outdated content, or last year’s case studies or old news. I challenge them to bring new thinking to the table. The site should challenge you to challenge yourself. If we do our job (and I’m confident we will), it won’t become that Catch-22 that so many other agency sites are.

Take a look around. Tell us what you REALLY think.

Then join the conversation, disagree, challenge others, reap the benefits, learn something, grow, share it with a friend.

I hope you enjoy your visit. Come back often.