Design
Design Books for Developers
Designing the Obvious is a book I ran into at Books a Million a few months ago. Usually when I head out to bookstores I grab a handful of books and end up scanning over them for tips, maybe reading a few relevant chapters, then putting it back. Very rarely do I end up reading [...]
CSS Naked Day #3
Once again it’s CSS Naked Day, a time to strip your site bare and see how good it looks without all that CSS. If you’re using Wordpress, you can grab the CSS Naked Day Plugin and not have to worry about disturbing your layouts once the day is through. So far I’ve been extremely happy [...]
Book 8: Microformats - Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0
Don’t look here for books 6 and 7; I’ve very kindly decided to skip reviews of Harry Potter books. Instead we’re skipping straight to book 8 which more on target.
Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0
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Haven’t heard much about Microformats? They are relatively new to the web, but use existing practices just marked up in [...]
Making the CSS Switch with Grids, Part 2
A month ago I was talking about designing with grids and specifically with 960 pixel wide grids due to the amount of divisors it has. Over the weekend a new CSS framework called Blueprint was release which emphasizes just those two aspects. Blueprint includes a small set of css files but packs quite a punch, [...]
Making the CSS Switch with Grids
CSS layouts have been all the rage for the last 5 years or, since Jeffery Zeldman’s groundbreaking book Designing With Web Standards and the rise of CSS Zen Garden. I’m obviously no designer, but the ideas behind why you’d want a CSS layout instead of a table based layout are becoming more important than ever [...]
Naked for a day?
Yes, April 5th is Naked day. I’m not suggesting going to work like that, but consider dropping your stylesheets for the day. Dustin Diaz appears to be leading the initiative with over 1400 sites already going buff today. I have to admit, since I use WordPress I hadn’t dug into the html, but seeing it [...]
Playing to Strengths
The hardest thing to work is almost always your weakness. My weakness has historically been design where I end up wasting countless hours trying to do something relatively simple to have it come out looking, well, not so great. This is the kind of thing that I’d happily pay (reasonably) to come up with a [...]
Interface Driven Architecture, by Hal Helms
Notes from Hal Helm’s talk on Interface Driven at Frameworks 2007.
The biggest complaint that users have with software is that it doesn’t work that way they want it to. We’re programmers not designers after all, so spending time on the interface isn’t our area of expertise.
When we talk about Frank Lloyd Wright buildings we [...]
Design and UI Updates
I wish I could take credit for the layout, but it’s a combination of the renown Wordpress K2 system with Steve Lam’s TrueBlue template. Until tonight I hadn’t understood what the hype was about with the K2 theme. It’s much more than a theme however. It’s a entire system for handling the wordpress [...]
Interview with Dan Cederholm of Simplebits
Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits has for a long time been one of the designers I’ve most respected. His code is extremely clean, self documenting and the results come out Bulletproof. His book is probably the best CSS reference I have seen, and changed my outlook on what CSS design should be. Brian Oberkirch has an [...]
