Frequently, when I see a webpage with superscript or subscript text, I see associated gaps in the paragraph. This is caused because the default way browsers render super and subscript text is to add enough vertical space in the paragraph to show them. The result is ugly, but as you can see in the following [...]
Archives for “design”
Talk Like Warren Ellis
A few weeks ago, I called my friend Miles and asked him to help me out with the programming on a project I dreamed up. Here’s how I put it to him: Scott: “I want you to help me with a project that will either get no attention at all, or a ton. [pause to [...]
Bugzilla’s Reset Password Page Sucks
Frequently, my coworkers will forget their Bugzilla passwords. They come to me, because I manage it, and I always send them to the reset password page. Inevitably, they come back a few minutes later and tell me that it didn’t work, and I just reset their passwords by hand. Well, I finally figured out the [...]
Why Aren’t You Using Fireworks to Compress Images?
I’m sure you’ve all heard the Fireworks vs. Photoshop debate. When I started at Pop Art, I was a Photoshop user. It was the application that we were taught in my graphic design program, and when I found out that the creative team used Fireworks, it took quite awhile for them to convince me that [...]
Who’s Afraid of HTML Email?
Anyone who tells you creating HTML email is easy has either never done it, or is lying. Inexperienced designers tend to think, “Oh, no problem, it’s all tables and font tags!” Grizzled veterans, however, know all too well the difficulties of getting anything but the most simple design to render well in a variety of [...]
Version Targeting and IE8 Followup
Hooray! The feedback from the web development community convinced the IE development team to change their minds about the default setting for version targeting in IE8 (as I discussed in a previous post). “In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting [...]
Version Targeting and IE8
Previously on Web Developer Controversies: Aaron Gustafson from the Internet Explorer development team announced that IE8 will use a META tag to kick the engine into standards mode by targeting a specific browser version, something that was previously done by using a valid DOCTYPE. A lot of people, including Jeremy Keith, think this is a [...]
The Email Standards Project
In 1998, Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded the Web Standards Project to fight for better support of web standards from the browser manufacturers and web developers. It was a success, if for no other reason than it provided a flag to rally behind. This year, the Email Standards Project was founded to rally support for web standards [...]
Good Web Designers are like Good Newspaper Designers
“The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging.” – Jeffrey Zeldman, [...]
A Few Dumb Questions
“I’d rather answer a few dumb questions than put up with a few dumb assumptions.” – Aaron Cannon, in reply to a question about whether he tires of people asking him about his blindness
41 Useful CSS Links
I was clearing out my bookmarks recently, and noticed that I had a pretty large collection of web development and CSS-related bookmarks that I never refer to any more, but might be useful to people who are just getting started with CSS. So with that in mind, here’s a collection of links, and I hope [...]
Web Design for Sara Ryan
In January, I got an email from Sara Ryan, asking if I would be interested in designing a website for her: Hi Scott — I found your site while searching for Portland web developers who use WordPress, and I really like the look and feel, as well as your focus on CSS and web standards. [...]
An Event Apart Seattle 2007
Last year, I attended An Event Apart 2006 in Seattle. It was a great event, although I remember it being really rushed, because they seven sessions packed into one day. So when I heard that they were coming back to Seattle, and had changed the format to two days, I signed up right away. I’m [...]
How Web Standards Made a Better Site for LP
What started as a simple project with LP to redesign their top-level landing pages quickly grew to encompass their entire site. This brought with it some surprising logistical difficulties, which the Pop Art team overcame through clever use of web standards. The end result is a new look applied across the entire site, with the [...]
First Annual Web Design Survey
“People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession.” A List Apart is hosting the first annual Web Design Survey in an effort to learn more about the people in the web design profession – presumably so we can have more [...]
CSS Naked Day ’07
It’s that time of year again when standards-conscious web designers shed their stylesheets and let their sites run around, exposing their raw markup to the world to promote web standards. The idea is that a standards-based site will be marked up semantically enough that even without the stylesheets, it’s still usable, if not pretty. I [...]
An Event Apart Seattle: Liveblogging the Event!
We’re here! It’s 8:50, and the big screen is showing a slideshow of photos that they guys must have taken yesterday when they got into town. The conference room is really nice – slightly elevated rows as you move back in the room, with Aeron chairs at the desks for each row (no power for [...]
Photoshop Mockup
Work is continuing on the new design for the blog. I’ve moved on from thumbnailing to making mockups in Photoshop. I had a few false starts, and entertained a few odd ideas at first, but I soon got my focus back and worked hard at producing the mockup based on the final thumbnail I chose. [...]
Thumbnailing
My graphic design teachers would be so damn proud of me. I’m working on the new design for Space Ninja, and I’m finding that it’s a much bigger project than I anticipated. It’s not just a simple new design, I’m making major changes to the way things function, and the flow of the entire website, [...]