Paul d'Aoust

it's ugly and beautiful at the same time. i love it. in fact, i think its beauty comes from its ugliness -- there is some serious abuse of IE7's quirks and 'featurea' here, and that's just fine with me. IE7 deserves to be abused.

actually, I think it's four circles joined together -- in Basecamp, circles are a repeating pattern used for people, so four circles are meant to symbolise a group of people -- indeed, a meaningful icon, just as you point out. Perhaps more meaningful than you were initially aware of! :-)

I hadn't noticed these elements before (except the circle). 37 Signals did a good job of introducing a consistent visual language. I love their concept of sheets.

Good reminders -- especially the lines about the difficulty of simplicity. Makes me less anxious about all the thought/time I spend making things concise.

fun idea!

very clever! Thanks for the tip; I hate having to create silly little PNG textures.

I just wanted to point out the white-space: nowrap line; it's important because otherwise you'll see lines two and beyond. It (and overflow: hidden, of course) are the secret sauce here.

@hauleth: in addition to being bad for SEO (see @ipetepete's comment) it's also difficult when you're using em-based units (which is really handy for fluid layouts). width: 24em will yield a zero-pixel box.

There's the question of whether any text-hiding technique (including this one) triggers Google's black-hat SEO sniffing. Some techniques, though (such as font-size: 0) are definite no-nos.

@wildlyinaccurate: I tested your statement out, and I'm not getting the same results. Perhaps you're thinking about overflow: auto and overflow: scroll?

@htbaa: This technique is for keeping the element (for styling with a background image) but hiding its text. Useful when you want fancy text that you could never duplicate in CSS; you create an image in your image editing program and apply it as a background image to stand in for the plain text.

Do you know how many times I've wished there was something like this in existence? Thank you!