web design – Page 2 – St. Eutychus

Design brief

I have been doing a bit of web design stuff for work and on my blog for a while now – and I still find CSS glitches in my ad hoc approach to changing things.

Here are three essential tools for making web design using CSS an easier job.

This Smashing Magazine CSS Tutorial is a must
Firebug – the Firefox extension that allows you to chop and change your code and watch what it does to your page as you do it.
A good CSS editor program (here are ten suggestions) takes out a lot of the grunt work.

Update – here are some cliched features to avoid. And my favourites listed in order of how annoying I find them…

Autoplaying music
Introduction movies with no skip button
Comic Sans
Overuse of stock images
Animated Globes

One that wasn’t on the list that I find particularly annoying is talking ads that don’t pop up but move across the page. I guess people are trying to prove that they’re tech savvy and stuff…

Am I missing anything design people?

October 6, 2009

Class = “mug”

Yeah, so I’m a geek. And I spend a fair bit of time trying to get frustrating CSS anomalies ironed out of our work website. So this mug is funny. Ok. That is all.

July 24, 2009

Something’s afoot(er)

You may have noticed a lack of posts today. I have an excuse – scroll to the bottom of the page and check out the new, improved, footer.

I’ll be playing with it a little more as time allows (and I’m still trying to get archived pages to actually work).

I’m watching the cricket tonight. It’s the first night of cricket that I haven’t had something on the next day. It’s nice. Robyn’s asleep on the couch, the fish tank is bubbling away… so much serenity.

July 18, 2009

Shirt of the Day: Ninja Code

For people who know CSS and like ninjas… Buy it here.

June 11, 2009

Knowledge of all font

Here’s a list of the 100 best fonts of all time – written in German – Helvetica takes out top spot. UPDATE: Here’s an English version of the 100 best fonts with a bit more info on how the list was compiled.

If lists aren’t your thing and you’re more a periodic table type here’s a periodic table of fontness (click it for the full sized version).

March 16, 2009

Sans serif

I just swapped the font on our website from Verdana to Helvetica. It looks nicer already. I don’t know why it was in Verdana to begin with.

Speaking of our website – if you’re from North Queensland and haven’t spammed your local candidates and the party leaders to tell them to fix the Flinders Street Mall – you totally should. Here. Now.

March 12, 2009

Coffeenatic

This is a beautiful looking coffee review forum and coffee recipe repository. It will be interesting to see how it develops.

March 4, 2009

48 shades of brown

Nick Earls is a pretty good writer. I enjoyed his books. Other than the title this post has nothing to do with Nick Earls.

Back when I was redesigning my old blog I was looking for the quintessential coffee colour. You can see the results here. That would have been much, much easier if I’d had this little web tool to help me. All you have to do is upload a picture and it gives you a colour palette complete with hex codes. You can download the palette as a photoshop palette file too. Very useful.

Here’s my colours of coffee series screenshots. The last image does arguably feature the titular 48 shades of brown too. Though some could be better described as shades of black or red.

February 17, 2009

From the desk of: other people

One of the things I really enjoy about blogs is being able to draw on the collective wisdom of people trailblazing a path that we plan to head down in the not too distant future. At the moment I’m enjoying a bunch of blogs from students currently studying at theological college.

I’ve subscribed to Bathgates.net for quite a while because Dan (who doesn’t blog enough) kept sharing really interestng posts from it via google reader. I like it’s style – that is to say I really like Ben’s style. He’s got a great post at the moment full of tip for people embarking on theological study. It’s well worth a read. One of the sad things about using a RSS reader to get all your content is that you lose the really nice design work people have done on their blogs.

Another absolutely superb design (it really is stunning and functional) – matched by great content and the longest, most philosophically deep “about me” page I’ve ever read – can be found at Dan Anderson’s papermind – I know Dan in real life (or IRL for you internet people). He’s a top bloke and is currently considering the purpose of studying philosophy while studying theology. The discussion is written in a style somewhat representative of Sophie’s Word – although the protagonists are a pair of slightly distracted philosophers. Worth a look thus far. Dan was also kind enough to add my blog to his blog roll so I’m responding in kind with this little plug. Did I mention that I really like his design? I do. WordPress is aesthetically quite pleasing.

January 28, 2009

CSS and desist

CSS is confusing. I just saw my new design in Internet Explorer 7 for the first time – and it still didn’t work. Oh for a standards compliant Microsoft… oh well, I think I fixed it by essentially ditching the transparency setting for Explorer. Still, my design looks better in Chrome and Firefox. I doubt that will be the tipping point for anyone contemplating switching browsers. Any Explorer readers out there finding this easier to read? Let me know please – older versions than IE7 may still have problems.

November 23, 2008

The new black

I’ve been doing a fair bit of HTML and CSS stuff at work lately.

So I found this shirt particularly amusing. I’d buy it – but my wife is campaigning against stupid shirts.

In other hexadecimal colour news – this site makes converting between RGB and Hex codes a breeze.

I don’t know how I, the colour blind guy with no design sense, became responsible for our website design (note: only the Corporate site – and the design is currently mostly broken and I’m not fixing it ahead of a comprehensive redesign), but that tool makes my job easier.

November 6, 2008