All 9 entries tagged Design

Redesigned

I decided to redesign my blog again, it's been useful for getting back into the swing of the whole xhtml/css thing. Doesn't look quite right in IE, but it's usable enough as far as I can tell.

I also disabled the ajaxy–expandy comments stuff because it was making a mess of my beautiful styling. I think i'm ready to get back to making lots of lovely blog themes.

: 14 Jul 2006 18:48 |  Tags: Design |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Lightbox v2

Writing about web page http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/

It's all fancy, but i'm not sure that I like that the animations cause the images to take longer to appear.

: 02 Apr 2006 23:08 |  Tags: Design |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Redesign'd

Redesign'd my blog, try it yourself. And i'll see you next week on Art Attack.

PS. it probably doesn't work in any version of IE5

: 03 Jan 2006 19:24 |  Tags: Design |  Comments (7) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Fastest CSS'er in the West

Tricked you, I had all my changes ready to paste as soon as the latest blogbuilder was deployed though. That's because i'm a prepared little monkey.

: 23 Sep 2005 16:51 |  Tags: Design |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

IE–specific blog problem

I doubt anybody's actually noticed this problem, but I thought occured to me that it might exist and it actually does.

If you try to print your blog in Internet Explorer, it will cause an error. Try it.

Before tags were introduced it wouldn't have.

IE doesn't like having "tags" as an ID, the tag list in your sidebar uses "tags" as an ID. It seems tags is a reserved word, there's been discussion of this going round the good ol' webdesign community of late, and it just occured to me that it would affect us.

But fear not, it'll probably be fixed in the next update because guess who has the job of fixing these things?

: 19 Sep 2005 21:46 |  Tags: Design |  Comments (8) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Restyle'd

Just been playing with the custom styling, everyone else has afterall. Doesn't look exactly right in IE, but then again I designed the style to take into account all the layout changes i've made (don't worry, there aren't many this time, in terms of styling the only change so far is that we're going back to the old siteLogoBar and link seperation).

I think users should be able to start with an unstyled base for their custom styles rather than having to override a huge number of css rules. It would also make custom css less likely to go horribly wrong on a blogbuilder update. It would also be a bit easier on the bandwidth.

: 18 Sep 2005 23:27 |  Tags: Creative Design |  Comments (17) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

blog title link area

As you may have noticed the area with your blog title and link now covers the full banner area, this is mainly for usability purposes – it's good to make link areas as big as you can logically justify, ie before the link starts covering spaces that don't make sense to be part of the link.

Now, I feel it makes sense for the whole area to be a link, no other page element is using it and the whole banner area is saying "this is my blog" – it's not just the words but the positioning too.

But, as people have mentioned, it also looks odd if you move your mouse over the right of the banner and the text to the far left gets the underline effect, I agree with this. In all the examples i've seen of using large areas (ie more than just the text) as links there is one of two behaviours:

• No hover effect at all, this makes sense because whilst the banner is a large link, it's primary purpose isn't to be a link but rather to display the name and personality of the blog. Users can easily work out that it can be clicked on by the change in cursor.
• Change the background rather than the text, so instead of the text getting underlined the background changes slightly instead (maybe a minor colour change), if an appropriate hover state is chosen this is generally quite effective.

As a blog is generally supposed to be a personal thing i'm hesitant to commit to any of the options (although, all styles can be overridden now anyway). So what are people's opinions?

: 16 Sep 2005 23:02 |  Tags: Design |  Comments (7) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Idea for CSS3 backgrounds

warning: nerdy entry

Imagine you have a banner section of your page which is a fluid width, you might have an image on top of a repeated background that blend together to create an illusion of just one image, see this nice diagram:

#1 would be your actual feature graphic, #2 would be the image that repeats behind it to create the seamless background (it would only have to be 1px wide).

what if it were possible to do it with just one image? borrowing the idea of clamping textures from learning opengl, you could add a simple extension to the background property in a stylesheet that causes the last row/column of pixels in the non-repeating direction of the single image to be used to fill in the rest of the space. so using something like the following code we could get the same effect as our example with just graphic #1:

background-image: url(image.png) no-repeat clamp;

could extend it to work if a pattern needs to be repeated by giving a pixel argument:

background-image: url(image.png) no-repeat clamp(10px);

If you say wanted your page background to have a pattern but also a unique section in one or both dimensions (currently a popular technique) you could achieve it with:

background-image: url(image.png) repeat-x clamp(20px);

this would repeat the image normally horizontally but vertically it would only repeat the bottom 20px of the image.

just an idea for css3 that might make some things easier really.

: 17 Aug 2005 03:16 |  Tags: Design |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

It would be cool if…

The words to watch out for in any sort of design process are "It would be cool if…". As soon as you hear them, prepare to spend the next hour explaining why it would be a bad idea.

Sometimes they might even be suggesting some interesting features, were it a completely different project.

Naturally, were the suggestion phrased as "a useful feature would be…" it immediately becomes more practical, it's also far easier to turn people away from useful ideas than cool ones – they tend to be less passionate about them.

This entry is dedicated to everyone who thinks a Star Wars font would look cool at the top of a website.

: 15 Aug 2005 16:20 |  Tags: Design |  Comments (8) |  Close comments |  Report a problem