The many redesigns are usually due to me getting bored with the site. My skills and design knowledge have improved and a personal brand redesign along the way have changed the look also.

Part of the problem comes with a lack of purpose for the site. Although a designer I don’t have much of a portfolio on the website – mainly because I am currently in full-time employment and do not show any work I do during office hours. The site also isn’t a promotional tool either so it only exists to be a place to blog and host experiments.

So I again rethink the purpose of the site, and after recent analysis reports being constructed by @RobHawkes I have been rethinking what I want to do with the site:

• Publish experiments
• Indepth research
• Front-end focused
• Collate social profile (last.fm, twitter, dribbble, delicious)
• Frequent blogging

This will no doubt come with a new website design, and i’m also thinking about moving from Wordpress to a custom CMS. Along with all the hacking i’ve heard about recently to Wordpress blogs I have always had a keen interest in optimisation and speed.

Watch this space.

Chances are, if you are good at jQuery you will be pretty good at MooTools (after learning the new declarations etc). The same goes for in a larger extent SQL/MySQL/Oracle or ASP/PHP/Ruby etc.

This stems from when I was at college and we would write psuedo-code, programming without any actually code. Something like this:


if number is greater than or equal to 10 then
write "congratulations, you are a winner!"


Now this very basic bit of programming isn’t very complex, but when building up larger bits of code, the skill comes in how you construct your code, not what language you write it in.

note: I am still a huge fan of jQuery, but MooTools does look pretty awesome as well. Perhaps I’ll write my own little comparison once I’ve used it a bit more.

The design called for centerally aligned list item links, and there could be 3, 4, 5 or more links. Initially I was stumped as to how to create this effect. I had considered a left margin to create the illusion of centre aligning for each possible number, but I knew there was a better way. I’m always aiming for a solution that works in the older browsers too, and this includes IE6. I don’t know why I do it to myself, especially as it apparently only has less than a 5% market share nowadays.

The Example

I’ll cut to the chase; here is the HTML and CSS.

http://prandall.com/experimental/centre-ul/

So How Does It Work?

On the UL, I am centre aligning the text, effectively making all the content aligning this way. That’s the real key to it, second only to display:inline on the LI, because a float will push everything to the left.

Below is all the CSS you need


ul{text-align:center;}
li{display:inline;}


Simples!

http://www.highersites.co.uk

We’re a web design company in Somerset, and although I have only recently joined the team in April, I have thoroughly enjoyed it so far – working on some great sites with an awesome team!

It is inevitable then that these new and shiny capabilities will catch a web designer’s eye (especially after years of browser constraints) but are we turning our eagerness to use the latest styling techniques into a world of monotonous and similar designs?

A Screenshot Showing Some Modern Design Trends

It’s worth saying that there are some great sites being produced at the minute. Something I hope to write about in a future post.

I’m a Magpie Designer Too!

This post isn’t without a sense of irony, i’m all too well aware of as this site features many of the effects i’m talking about. I’m clearly a magpie designer too!

In a years time things will probably calm down when “the next thing” arrives, whatever it is.

After a long period of inactivity, due to a new job, and other things the site has sat a little dorment. I thought it was time for a change, and after many, many revisions I decided to finally design something. So, after a few hours of work this weekend – here it is.

I’m hoping to tidy a few things up over the next week, and I will follow that up with a more indepth blog on the designs that didn’t make it.

If you do notice something weird, feel free to post a comment. It hasn’t been browser tested, but bear in mind that things may look a little funky for the next few days.

My experiment uses a top left, top right, bottom left and bottom right png gradient on the HTML element, with a repeating png overlay on the BODY.

As I firmly believe that you should make your design look at least acceptable in Internet Explorer 6, I have used Modernizr, a JavaScript library that allows you to take advantage of emerging web technologies.

It’s the first time I have used it and I can see the huge potential of it. This system uses feature detection to add classes to the HTML document, allowing you to progressively enhance your websites.

In this example, I have been using multiplebgs, which allowed me to use the CSS3 technology only on sites that supported it. That allowed me to use a fallback JPG image for browsers that don’t.

Here is the CSS code:


html.multiplebgs{
background-color: #141414;

background-position: top left, top right,
bottom left, bottom right;
}
body{background: url('fallback-bg.jpg') repeat; height:100%; width:100%;}
.multiplebgs body{background: url('body-bg.png');}


See the Example

http://prandall.com/experimental/css3-backgrounds/

If you have used multiple backgrounds before i’d love you to leave a comment and link to an example.

A couple of recent designs have left me wondering whether we should be ’showing our workings’ and display the grid at all, whether subtlety like Jina Bolton’s Sushi & Robots or something more elaborate, like Analog (note: press Alt+G).

Once visible, the precision of the grid acts as evidence of design credibility, and its purity of form has a mystical draw.

A Brief History of Grids, Lucienne Roberts http://www.graphics.com/modules.php?name=Sections&op=viewarticle&artid=620

Having a visible grid is certainly not new; Here you can see the Vormgevers exhibition poster in 1968 by Wim Crouwel.

I’m certainly not going to say if the grid should be visible or not, but I’d love to hear your thoughts or opinions on the topic, or just to add a link to a site where you have seen a visible grid used well.

Inspiration

Mercedes Benz Typographic Animation
Flickr Pool of Vintage Type
Use Of Effective Typography In Logo Design
Typography Mania #13 by Abduzeedo
Vibrant Wall Typography/Graffiti from Ripo Visuals
The Best Custom Letters of 2009

Web Typography

Typechart: Preview and compare web typography. Retrieve the CSS
Revised Font Stacks
Fontspring: Hundreds of web-ready fonts at your fingertips

Fonts

Today Sans H EF Extra Light
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface by Michael Bierut
Haäfe & Haph presents a selection of custom ampersands

I am hoping to give Typography Links a dedicated website soon, where you will be able to subscribe via RSS and submit your own links. Details in the coming weeks.

Leaving comments to me just shows my appreciation to the writer. It’s not for linking reasons, or to get my name out there, but I feel it’s a way of thanking the writer or expressing an opinion I have on the subject. Most of us write blog posts in our spare time, and I know personally that I enjoy it when someone leaves a comment. It shows that it interested them, or provoked a response; good or bad. I find that the narrative of comments almost always positively extends the actual article, and if it doesn’t then it usually leads to a healthy debate.

We all read blog posts, possibly hundreds in a week, but how many do you actually comment on? Next time take a minute to leave a comment.