Web Designers or developers care more for site design, colors, arrangement of the form elements, User Interface etc. rather than designing a cool, pleasant and great looking forms as they give designing form elements as a lowest priority.

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Even though very few designers concentrate on form look and feel, in reality it makes a lot of difference in many applications. Few do styling form fields with simple CSS tricks and one thing for sure.. making them browser compatible is a bit tough job!

This tutorial will teach you how to create a good looking rounded corner forms by using the beauty of css and images. This is not confined to just beautifying the search box but this basic tutorial will help you to build custom good looking forms. So, lets play with custom look input fields and buttons with images :)

Although there are couple of interesting tutorials all around the web to create good looking forms, this will be a good tutorial for starters or for designers or developers who wants to know on how it works, etc.

Let’s start to make custom good looking and simple css and image based search box:

1. Create a simple form (HTML) which contains a text input field and a button, below is the code on how it looks like

Search

As you might have observed in the above code you might have a doubt why do we need an DIV with search as an Id? right? – let me clear it, this is just to take the reference of css not to overwrite other form elements if you have many fields in a page. You can have your own div tags and different look n feel for each form elements etc. You can even apply css class, as we gonna make it simple we just avoided all those in the forms and css to reduce the load of HTML form rendering.

2. CSS Style sheet to render the above form

#search {
	font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
	display:block;
	padding:35px 35px;
	border: 1px solid #CCCCCC;
	width: 330px;
	height: 40px;
}
#search input {
	font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
	background:transparent url(images/bg-search.png) no-repeat scroll 0 0;
	border:none;
	font-size:1.0em;
	color:#444444;
	padding:6px 10px 8px 10px;
	width:182px;
	float:left;
}
#search input:focus, #search input:hover, #search button:focus, #search button:hover {
	background:transparent url(images/bg-search.png) no-repeat scroll -312px 0px;
}
#search button {
	font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
	background:transparent url(images/bg-search.png) no-repeat scroll -202px 0px;
	border:none;
	font-size:1.0em;
	color:#952200;
	padding:0px 10px 0px 10px;
	font-weight: bold;
	height:32px;
	width:110px;
	float:left;
}
#search button:focus, #search button:hover {
	background:transparent url(images/bg-search.png) no-repeat scroll -514px 0px;
	color:#fff;
}

Let me explain the above CSS Stylesheet –
– “#search” makes a simple box around the form you can even avoid this.
– “#search input” refers to the input field within the search id div box. Observed the background? there comes the your own custom image background for the form fields.
– I have used the single image to represent this search box to avoid loading of multiple images either on mouse over or mouse out etc.
– Just played with the position of the image to represent the form elements as you can observe “-312px”, “-202px”, “-514px”, “0px” etc.
– And the rest I think you can change based on the look n feel of your site like font-family, height, width, font-size, color, padding etc.

Summary: Hope you learn few tips from the tutorials, like it? then spread the resource all over the web.

Further Reading...

pForm – Free HTML Form Builder

Giveaway – PixelKit Premium UI Kits and Resources

Interesting tips to build Good User Interface