I spent this morning arranging a gui for the new French department website. I implemented the/a basic design (the template right now has areas for the banner, menu, content and footer areas). After putting up the template I also was able to create a fully functional menu with horizontal fly out sub menus and tested it for IE6 and Firefox compliance. (The page is using xhtml 1.1 and it validates wonderfully so far.)

I have been spending some time trying to replicate a banner similar to the one that the department liked at zen garden: http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=200/200.css. So, I am learning how to do that torn paper affect with Photoshop at the moment. There are different ways of doing it but the one I see that will replicate it the best is with using layer masks.