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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August 08, 2005
I've just received my copy of Professional CSS - Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design so I'd thought I'd share my first thoughts after flicking through the book.
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July 25, 2005
I've got some projects on at the moment which are requiring me to think long and hard about tags, metadata and 'folksonomies' (of the Del.icio.us and Flickr kind). I'm getting nowhere fast in terms of user requirements for tags and was wondering if you could help me out.
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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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July 04, 2005
The first part of this Five Simple Steps series is taking some of the points discussed in the preface and putting it to practice.
Ratios are at the core of any well designed grid system. Sometimes those ratios are rational, such as 1:2 or 2:3, others are irrational such as the 1:1.414 (the proportion of A4). This first part is about how to combine those ratios to create simple, balanced grids which in turn will help you create harmonious compositions.
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June 26, 2005
Following my article in Design in Flight I've received countless emails to elaborate, in some way, on how to correctly design grid systems. It's quite a complicated field and so distilling it into 'Five Simple Steps' has proven to be quite tricky, so much so that I thought I needed to write some sort of preface before we get on to the first part.
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June 02, 2005
I’ve got a several large projects ahead of me at the moment and it’s at that stage where you are mentally planning out how to go about certain things with the end result in mind.
There’s a fair bit of talk about modularisation at the moment, not only for content, but for the HTML and CSS, and this is the way I’m currently going for the projects. This is partly based on past experience, but also I believe it’s the right thing to do, especially on large projects.
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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