Post Archive

› November 30, 2003

Colours on the Web

A long time since I last saw a post on this blog that was really well connected with it's name, so I thought a post about colours on the web would be appropriate. There are a lot of pages about colours out there, and most of them have web safe colours as their primary topic. But how do you arrive at what colours you should use in a design, what looks best together with another colour, what gives the best contrast while still being harmonious? One site on the web dedicated to colour theory is Colours on the Web by Donald Johansson, one of the real treasures on this topic. It's not the only site dedicated to this, Color Overview by Worqx and Color Contrast & Dimention in News Design by Pegie Stark Adam also provide a good insight into colour theory.
Some other sites that might be useful in chosing the components of your colour scheme, are Web Colours Theory and Principles of Graphics Design by Mundi Design Studios.

› November 27, 2003

SafariCam

For the Windows-only users: Dan Vine's tool takes screenshots of your website, as seen on Safari/Mac.

› November 24, 2003

Margin Collapse

Andy Budd has an interesting post on margin collapse: "Margin collapsing is a CSS phenomenon I've been familiar with for a while. Conceptially It's very simple, however recently I've been running into a number of problems..."

› November 21, 2003

CSS: The Underscore MSIE-Only Hack

There is a simple CSS hack allowing you set CSS properties for Windows IE only. Czech web designer Petr Pisar found it out: if you add the underscore ("_") before the property name, WinIE ignores it and uses the property without the underscore. See details on my web.

› November 19, 2003

Converting OpenOffice.org documents to XHTML 1.0 strict

OpenOffice.org 1.1 has a lot of excellent features and allows you to save or export files in a range of formats, going from *.sxw over *.doc and *.rtf to even *.pdf and so on. Unfortunately, when creating html documents, the OpenOffice.org suite doesn't generate standards compliant html markup.

Luckily enough, there is Henrik Just's Writer2LaTeX utility. Writer2LaTeX? Yup, despite its name, it allows users to convert an sxw document into a standards compliant html page (xhtml 1.0 strict, to be precise). However, as both the documentation and the setup of this otherwise excellent tool are pretty confusing, I made a sort of howto: Converting OpenOffice.org documents to xhtml 1.0 strict with Writer2LaTeX: a quickguide. Voila.

› November 18, 2003

delicious

Very neat linking system using the power of REST is being developed, it's called delicious. So simple and easy, I've folded it into the sidebar of this site (homepage only). The sidebar header that used to be a catchall (happenings) is now a remaindered style link list that I can dump links to super-extra quick. I also owe credit to this php script, which I slightly modified for use here.

Cederholm interview

Dave Shea (mezzoblue/wasp), conducts a wasp interview with Dan Cederholm, the man who switched FastCompany/Inc.com over to web standards. Dan also runs the most excellent simplebits.

› November 15, 2003

ReUSEIT winner!

Check out the full announcement or have a sneak peak at the winning entry - Mike Picks "Kraftsman".

Advanced CSS Ornamentation

The Literary Moose has a mind boggling article on generated content at the Nemesis Project:

"This article is focused on techniques exploring the potential for web page decoration. To this end, I advocate the widespread use of generated content — in my opinion the strongest and most precise tool for controlling the display where the accessible, semantic, and pure markup leaves little room for maneuverability."

› November 14, 2003

This site is broken

Sorry Windows IE users, this site layout is broken (except when using the "raw" style). I don't have time to fix it right away, but in the meanwhile, you can read about other stuff that's broken.

› November 13, 2003

Chat with Nate and Pepe

So if you've read the Web-Graphics about page, you know that this site was designed and constructed by primarily two people (Nate and Pepe). Our two person company has been fairing well, and as a result we have a new office in Decatur, Georgia, and a couple of Apple iSight cameras.

We figured that we should get the most use out of these little cameras, and what better way than to let readers of Web-Graphics know how to contact us. If you don't have an iSight, you can still chat with us over AIM. In the photo below - Nate is tr3pleshot (hatless), Pepe is SnarferX (hatted). Nate and Pepe are ready to chat with you

Cite your blockquotes

Tony Stephens of Simian Design, and a Web-Graphics author, has written an article on citations with blockquotes. It's a great introduction to the practical use of attribute selectors.

The results look clean and elegant in browsers that support it and degrades gracefully in browsers that don't (similar to Dave Shea's MOSe).

› November 12, 2003

Super Handy Dandy CSS Layout Creator.

This 'nifty' (as Chris Hester calls it) application produces a 3 column CSS layout, that has fixed width left and/or right columns with a dynamic width center column, all the same height with header and footer.
[via 'fixed vs liquid' discussion on Asterisk*]

› November 11, 2003

ColorMatch Remix

From Twysted.net comes a remake (with the authors blessing) of a the ColorMatch 5k (here is the original) slider based web color picker. Improvements include valid XHTML 1.1 table-less layout, and a really useful Adobe Photoshop swatch file export (act file). I think this ColorMatch Remix tool is worth a bookmark.

My little graphic below shows that after you've messed around with the sliders and found a nice color harmony to use in your design, it's a very simple matter to get those colors into Photoshop - no typing in hex codes needed.
ColorMatch Remix usage process

For those who have upgraded to Adobe Creative Suite and notice the Illustrator icon in my graphic - Illustrator .act files are a different beast, my system chose to give the downloaded file an illustrator icon, but it works just great in photoshop, perhaps we can persuade the author of this fine tool to make an Illustrator act file export as well?
Update: Illustrator swatch files are now supported!

CSS-based ransom notes?

Jeremy Keith, of Adactio fame, has made a CSS-based ransom note version of his blog. Very cool. And, yes, I'm sure he is aware that there are some "separation of content and style" issues.

› November 10, 2003

IE 3-6 on one machine

Wow, ok, now not only can you download stand-alone versions of IE 5.01, 5.5, and 6 (and install them on one version of windows - see previous post), Ryan of Skyzyx has made IE 3 and 4.01 downloadable and installable.

In my own work I've already started seeing the extreeme benifits of being able to test without rebooting or using windows emulation.

› November 8, 2003

Two new P.I.E. articles

Big John and Holly Bergevin have written two great new articles at Position is Everything (P.I.E.).

Flowing and Positioning: Two Page Models - A detailed discussion of flowing and positioning.

Float: The Theory - The basics of standard floating.

There is also an older companion article worth reading - Towards A More Standards Compliant Internet Explorer - that explains "exactly why the IE float model is so very bad".

› November 7, 2003

MT template giveaway

Sorry for the self-promotive ring in this entry, but I thought I'd let you know that the templates of my small Movable Type driven weblog are available for download. They are licensed under a Creative Commons attribution license, so feel free to reuse, tweak or modify them as you like.

› November 6, 2003

Gazingus

Wow what a relief. Dave has shared such usefullness that a new feeling of inner peace washeed over me after realizing that Gazingus is back. I, for one, have downloaded every publibly viewable file, just in case. It's good to have your work available again Dave.

The good news, is via Ubiquitous Z (his little known dj name), and comes with further good news that a new take on the XHTML list as DHTMLesk menu will arrive in the A List Apart of tomorrow.

Multiple IE in Windows

As if magically solving one of the most vexing problems of just about every web designer, Joe Maddalone has discovered how to run multiple versions of IE side by side. If this works, we can finally say goodbye to rebooting to test web pages on various versions of IE, or if you have multiple windows boxes for this purpose - clear off some desk space. I can't wait to try this. Thanks for the link branchleft.

› November 4, 2003

ReUSEIT! Contest Entries

Remember the ReUsit! competion?

"Create a redesign of Jakob Nielsen's useit.com. Design a usable, intuitive layout and navigation, organize the content with usability in mind, and create a work of art which still reflects the importance and influence of Nielsen's work".

Well, the competition recently closed and the 53 entries are now on display. An interesting varety of approaches.