Dave Shea has accepted my submission to the CSS Zen Garden titled Boddhidarma. Dave was very kind with me and worked through iterations of the design until it came out looking decent. What a pleasure it was to work on this and learn some new techniques. The design has a print look to it. I wanted to work with Zen Buddhist Art images, so I started with a Buddhist text and overlayed it with 2 ukiyo-e images of a bamboo plant in sillhouette and one of a bird. That image set the tone for the layout, which is quite simple actually.

The one technique that everyone is using here which I wasn't aware of is Douglas Bowman's unique method for Using Background-Image to Replace Text. I will definitely be using that one for a long time to come now. The area that I had the most difficulty with was the two column set of links in the lower left hand corner. I still don't know if I did it the best way, but it works everywhere perfectly except for Opera. I had to do a little contingency design with my CSS there because there is a possibility of a fourth block showing up in the future and the first block seems to be growing quite long.

Anyway was a wonderful experience that I highly recommend if you want to cut your teeth on CSS using markup that you cannot control. Taking on that challenge alone is worth the effort.