November 24, 2005
In the Web Standards community we hear the words 'Semantic Markup' thrown around a lot as a concept—the right thing to do— but I know a lot of designers who are trying to learn this stuff are being confused by the whole 'semantic thing'.
It's a difficult task for a designer, who primarily thinks very visually, to relate to a concept like semantics in a document when all they want to do is create something.
After doing a ton of research over the past couple of weeks I've begun to notice links and patterns between typographic theory and Web Standards.
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November 08, 2005
This morning I received some sad news in my Inbox. After 21 years of being published, Emigr? magazine is finally calling it a day.
I don't really know where to begin when describing the effect Emigr? has on my path to become a designer. I'm sure I speak for a lot of designers when I say Emigr? deeply influenced my work throughout university - Not just in terms of how the magazine was designed, and the beautiful typography, but by the articles themselves.
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November 04, 2005
This is something I've been meaning to do for a while now. Every month, from now on, there will be a typeface of the month. They'll be chosen by me because either I like them, they're new, they're classics or I hate them. Should be fun. So, first up is quite possibly my favourite serif typeface: Mrs Eaves, designed by Zuzana Licko for the Emigr? Type Foundry.
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September 19, 2005
It's been a while, but this is the final part in my series 'Five Simple Steps to designing Grid Systems'.
Flexible vs Fixed. Which one to choose? Why choose one over the other? Well you won't find the answers to those questions here. What I'm aiming to do with this article is to investigate how the theory of grid design can be applied to a flexible web page.
Lets's start by briefly examining Fixed and Flexible, or Fluid designs.
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August 30, 2005
Layout seems to be a hot topic at the moment, mostly prompted by the ALA redesign and the numerous discussions of the choice by Jason and the ALA team to go 1024 for a fixed width. I'm not going to go into my thoughts on ALA in too much depth here, there's been a lot of that already, but it seems like the right time to get this article out.
So, fixed width grid design for the web. What is it, how do we do it and how do we implement it?
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August 09, 2005
The third installment to this series is going to be a little different. The previous installments have been talking through some of the basics of grid construction using ratios as the primary device. They've also dealt with grid construction for print media. Unfortunately, as designers for web media, we don't have some of the luxuries as our print designer collegues.
Rather than go through tutorials (I'll be covering these in the last two installments), I'll be using this installment as a platform to discuss some of the challenges and rewards of designing grid systems for the web.
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July 26, 2005
I received an email from today from this guy called Larry. He asked me if I thought typography is a dying art form. I'm sure he won't mind, but I thought it would be quite nice to get the opinions of other people as well to form a more general consensus.
So, I'll kick it off.
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July 16, 2005
In part one of this Simple Steps series I talked about how to use a simple ratio, that of the paper size you are using, to create a symmetrical grid on which to create your designs. This, the second part in the series, will deal with other ratios and how they can be combined to create more complex grid systems.
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I'm a graphic designer from near Cardiff in the UK. I've been a designer for over ten years now and primarily work on the web. I'm still partial to a bit of print every now and then though. I used to work for