Archive for the ‘Web design’ Category

Beef up your gutters and put your columns on a diet

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

Thumbing through the UK version of WIRED magazine the other day made me realise that online there is very little experimentation or use of quirky or edgy layouts like we see in print. What I mean by this is most layouts online tend to be safe. They express a certain conservative nature with uniformed gutter sizes and content columns of same or similar width. They don’t evoke any emotion. Reading WIRED provokes emotion; each article has its own identity and style related to the content. One column may be far slimmer than the next with a gutter between them that you could drive a tank through.

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Tags: columns, CSS, design, graphic design, gutters, HTML, layout, typography
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Web typography discussion

Saturday, October 17th, 2009

I had a good conversation with Michael Wood yesterday whilst I was writing up a document on why I felt our design team, going forwards, should be using Cufón instead of sIFR for text replacement. Michael pointed me in the direction of a couple of sites that were inspirational to him and put forwards the argument that he has read too many times the cussing from web designers complaining about the lack of typefaces available that are considered web safe. Safe fonts are those that are regular system font installations for either PC or Mac. Those same web designers that complain could in fact vastly improve the typography of their sites by learning typographic skills. When looking at their personal website and sites that are in their portfolio it is clear to see that they haven’t mastered the art of type setting for the web.

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Tags: cufón, font, gutter, kerning, leading, line-height, michael wood, sIFR, system font, typeface, typography, web safe font
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Working Smarter: Standardise your code

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

In my previous post about keeping a code snippets library I eluded to the fact that within this file structure I had created a number of HTML skeletons which give me a basis for beginning a new project. It removes the medial task of creating a container <div> and the usual suspects of a header region <div id=&quo;header&quo; />, content area <div id=&quo;content&quo; /> and <div id=&quo;footer&quo; />. I tab indent my code for easy scanning too so shaving off the few minutes laying these out correctly along with other items that may get missed within your <head> such as common <meta>. I took my skeletons a bit further by adding in unordered list items for the menu area, aside and footer. These may not all be used but it is quicker to delete than it is to type.

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Tags: CSS, HTML, semantics, sexy stylesheets, standardise code, working smarter
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