February 26, 2004
For not writing anything for a month. shockingly bad. But in my defense i’ve had a lot going on. I’ve been on holiday to Switzerland, snowboarding, and broke my finger on the second day which was rubbish. So, now i’m strapped up with visits every couple of weeks to fracture clinic. On top of that i’ve had a stinker of a cold. Other than that, what’s happening?
Well, work wise things are ticking along with several big launches coming up as well as an increasing usability / IA work load. On top of that i’m heavily involved in the content management workflow. BUT, the cool thing is, i’m off to SXSW in March for 7 days in the US of A. Should be really good. Some big names are there, so hopefully i’ll be hobnobbing with the likes of Zeldman and Doug Bowman.
I’ll be hopefully getting round to getting the homepage of this site built as well as the inclusion of the portfolio (with a little help from a great article by hicks design) I still need to do the contact forms and stuff as well as getting the photo gallery online too. Should be easy enough, but with organising a wedding as well, things are a little bonkers at the moment.
Talking of Snooch, the knocked back blue look is beginning to bug me slightly so expect an introduction of some lovely colour throughout the coming months in addition to some tweaks to the stylesheets.
January 13, 2004
Some interesting articles around at the moment.
ALA as always delivers the goods this week with two great articles. Faux Columns answers some questions in my mind about vertically stretching divs etc. Elastic Design adds some thoughts surrounding the whole fixed/liquid thing.
Max design has a great “how to” guide on building a full CSS site. It takes you through the simple building blocks of writing semantic code and useful CSS. There’s a great section on print stylesheets too.
Found this site of an agency called 37signals which has a good balance of design and usability. They have some really good visuals of usability reports and that kind of thing (i’m finding this sort of thing with a brand guide I need to write soon). Some good resources and writing too.
Zeldman’s done a redesign which is cool although I find the tabs a little odd.
January 08, 2004
What did I do over Christmas and New Year?
Eat
Sleep
Eat some more
Watch some telly
Drive
Eat
Sleep
Play with kids
Eat
Open presents
Shop
Eat
Sit on my ass
Sleep
Nice being home for Christmas with the oldies, we did cook which was fun seeing my mum flap around the kitchen not knowing what to do with herself. But why does Christmas have to be about excess? Sick of it this year - far too much sitting around being lazy, eating rich - bad for you food, very, very boring. Roll on next year where i’ll be out in Portugal. Sun, beach, swimming and grilled fish - now that’s what Christmas should be like!
December 17, 2003
A lot has been said over the do’s and don’t’s of layout on screen. Designers who have a traditional design background, advocate a fixed column width is the way to go. Designers who have spent most of their working life designing for screen will be a little less retesent to go for a flexible layout (aka. Amazon). Of course the likes of Jakob Nielson will advocate that a flexible layout is more appropriate for browser window for usability purposes.
I kind of sit in the middle. The typographer in me screams “NO! Em’s are there for a reason, you can take advantage of them in CSS, so do it!” But the usability half of me see’s the advantages of a flexible layout and Doug’s site Stop Design proved this point well with one of the best flexible layouts i’ve seen. I say “proved” because he’s recently changed it to a fixed width which has prompted my post here.
There’s been some arguments about the “death of flexible width designs”. Personally the type of flexible width designs we’ve seen (amazon etc) should go simply because they degrade legibility by having no control over the line length of text.
“Hold on a minute! You can’t get rid of them all together” I hear you cry. No, we shouldn’t. We should replace them. True, the Snooch site is currently flexible, but i’m going to move it over to a fixed width BUT instead of the fixed width being based upon a pixel width, it will be based upon a em measurement.
So, how is this done? Well, first of all for those who don’t know, an “em” is a measurement in typesetting which is the width of the capital M of the font and size you are using. The “em” is a relational measurement, unlike a pixel which is a fixed measurement. Relationships like this are all important in “proper” typography. Line widths are related to the width of the font you are using. So, what i’m planning to do is have a “fixed” column width based on em’s BUT, this is the clever bit, If the users font size is a different size to the one specified in the stylesheet the column width would change accordingly ensuring legibility is retained. This is different to pixel width columns which retain that set width regardless of the size of the font.
Watch this site over the next few days for a change…
December 10, 2003
Some minor changes to the Snooch CSS to ensure Screen and Print stylesheets are working correctly.
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December 08, 2003
Imaginet launched the Arriva Trains Wales website yesterday using Standards Based design for markup and layout. all credit to them, it looks good, works well cross browser. There’s a few bugs, the pages don’t validate as XHTML Strict although content or the odd tag is producing the errors - nothing major.
It’s good to see a major player such as Imaginet here in Cardiff launching a site like this. All credit to them.
December 08, 2003
“Mac OS X version 10.3 “Panther” contains over 150 new features and provides significant enhancements to its modern, UNIX-based foundation...” So goes the blurb from Apple. After installing OS X about 3 weeks ago I have to say it’s an improvement on 10.2 but not worth the upgrade price of ?99. However, it is worth the upgrade if you’re jumping from OS9. Now would be a good time to upgrade.
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December 05, 2003
How many times have you heard “I’m sick of websites looking boxy”, no? Well, I get it almost every week. Once again ALA come up with the goods with a fantastic article of creating rounded corners using css and semantic markup.
What’s really interesting here is when the user’s font size is increased, the thing doesn’t break at all! I had to get up to about 300% of the original specified font size for the corners to start degrading. Thing is, it wasn’t the corners that degraded - it was the type within the div (breaking out of the div). Very nice.
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