Journal

Rather nice site

  • Posted on: November 05, 2004
  • In: Design, CSS
  • Comments closed

Having featured on Stylegala when this site was launched I regularly look at the gallery and say the odd thing in the forums. Occasionally a site featured on the gallery jumps out at me as being something rather special - today was one of those days.

Simmons College website is very refreshing, not only in terms of CSS, but also in terms of design. The palette is spot on, in design trend terms - earthy, pastels, calming colours. The inspiration is from the illustrations used on the site (and it’s nice to see illustrations being used). The typography is also very tasteful. Clean serifs and san serifs throughout, although sometimes they don’t quite work and look a bit cluttered.

Very nice site though and well worth ten minutes of your time looking round it.

Comments

Sorry mate it may look hunky dory on the current browsers but in terms of thought for earlier browsers it sinks like the Bismark. I don’t know what your thoughts are on this but pesonally I think consideration should be given for earlier browsers so that at least it’s viewable, it’s not difficult afterall. Check it for yourself on MAC IE 5.0… big thumbs down from me I’m afraid :(

Graham Sanders's Gravatar

Graham Sanders
Sat 6th Nov 2004
at 8:43 am

It depends what you mean.

Technically it may not pass the IE 5 test. But, I wasn’t really talking about it’s superb semantic markup and flawless CSS, but it’s refreshing design and palette.

MAC IE 5 is quite possibly the worst browser on the market at the moment, with the most bugs, BUT that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t design to it. The whole point of completely CSS rendered sites means that if your browser doesn’t fully support the CSS used, you can turn stylesheets off. This isn’t a good solution though.

There are ways to design to MAC IE 5, they take a little longer and require a lot of fiddling, bit it can, and should be done.

Presumably this site looks ok in it?

Mark Boulton's Gravatar

Mark Boulton
Sat 6th Nov 2004
at 10:12 am

Asthe site doesn’t render properly in IE 5 then I can’t really see if the site does have a “refreshing design and palette” :)

I’m glad you’re with me on the site rendering in IE 5 argument. You’d be surprised by the opposition I’ve had from people who use say that people don’t need to design for the browser as the percentage is negligible.

As for your site well yes it does look quite presentable BUT there were a few little things you may like to look at:

Home page
The “Read more...” link under about us doesn’t link or rollover. (the only case on this page)

http://snooch.org.uk/portfolio
There’s unecessary height scrolling

Graham Sanders's Gravatar

Graham Sanders
Sat 6th Nov 2004
at 10:25 am

IE 5 on a Mac is only ‘partially’ supported by a lot of big companies and their websites. I can see their point of view. When only a very small percentage of users use that browser, say 2%, then it generally doesn’t make financial sense to invest in the development. But, the thing is a lot of these companies may have 8-10 million page impressions a day - 2% of that is a lot of people.

The bugs that you see in IE 5 on Mac are normally created by legacy - mixing CSS and tables, or by developers who aren’t familiar with, or can’t be bothered to, develop with IE 5 Mac’s quirks. It is in the absolute minority now though with Safari, and closely behind it - Firefox, being the majority used and supported browsers (according the research i’ve read anyway.)

Thanks for your comments about the link on the homepage, i’ll look into it.

Mark's Gravatar

Mark
Sat 6th Nov 2004
at 11:25 am

Commenting is not available in this section entry.

Next entry: Cardiff Screen Festival - Focus on Interactive zzzz

Previous entry: BBC Vocab offical launch

A picture of Mark BoultonI'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 Agency.com in London as an Art Director before working as a Senior Designer for the BBC in sunny Cardiff. This was all before I took leave of my senses and formed my own design consultancy, Mark Boulton Design Ltd.

I've got a thing about grids and typography and occasionally ramble on about them to anyone who will listen.

If you're after simple, clean and effective web design; let me know.