After a brief, one month absence the monthly wallpaper is back!
The November 2009 wallpaper is very minimalist, based on a simplistic pixel grid, inspired by the recently launched cleartypemedia.com. The font is the fantastic Vegur (Extra Light) Don’t worry if this isn’t your cup of tea—expect a festive theme for December!.
I hope you like the wallpaper. If you have any feedback or messages, please do leave a comment below.
Whenever I start a new project, I seem to be repeating myself when it comes to adding, and styling basic content: Headers, Lists and Tables etc.
So I decided to create a ‘Kitchen Sink’ of markup and basic styling, using some content from the great HTML-Ipsum.com plus a few extra bits.
This is a topic I recently tweeted about, and one I think we forget about sometimes:
As designers, our job is to make our work invisible. Good design just looks ‘right’ without being obvious to the user. Without fuss.
I have now (soft) launched the site in time for ScrunchUp.com’s first edition, but I won’t lie, finding the time to work on my personal site has been tricky, and the version you see today will no doubt change in the coming weeks (just after I’ve had some sleep!).
In doing the redesign, the style changed at many stages, although most never made it past a quick Photoshop mockup. I knew I wanted a change, as I felt my style evolved, and the previous incarnation was no longer suited.
I had been working on this current style on-and-off for the past month or so, and I thought I had nailed the look and I eagerly began converting it to XHTML/CSS.
Now at this point, if your client asks for changes this late in the stage, you ask yourself why the designs were signed off in the first place. But I was one of those clients!
The change of look came about after watching graphic designs videos on YouTube late one night. Afterwards, I was sketching s few logos, playing around with my initials and left it at that. the following day, I has only planned to make some PhotoShop versions of thr sketches for Flickr, but that soon turned into a major brand redesign. I had some positive feedback decided to bite the bullet and change my ‘brand’.
My old logo was Georgia based, and the site redesign focused on serif headings with additional touches of Adobe Caslon Pro. The new logo wasn’t going to match with the site. I had a dilemma.
Cue a week of frantic typographic redesigning and colour scheme changes; gone is the light brown, red and green in comes red, white and black.
I hope you like the redesign, but please bear in mind that the site is not 100% finished, and there are plans to add more in the coming weeks and months.
For September, I was inspired by the work of Andy Gilmore and created this months wallpaper around the geometric styling of his work.
I have recently been working on sites which have had the need for pixel perfect alignment, and I came across an alignment anomaly among the major browsers.
Previously, I have used IE7/ IE6 specific style sheets with completely new backgrounds, each 1px to the left or right of the original to compensate, but I decided to do some digging and found this blog post:
http://www.sohtanaka.com/web-design/1px-background-alignment-bug/
One of the comments I came across suggested a very simple alternative to multiple stylesheets and images, and is the version I used in my recent design:
html{background: #242424 url('../img/background.gif') repeat-y center; margin-left: -.1px; /*1px shifting hack*/}
A simple use of a margin allows the same image to be used for all browsers. What’s even better is that, although technically a hack, it is valid.
My third wallpaper-of-the-month, and this time it has a Twitter theme. I have decided not to add a calendar to it (but if you object, please let me know, but it at least allows you to have the wallpaper for more than one month of the year)
Being creative is one of the most important aspects of a designers life. You can’t turn creativity like a tap (if only!) but you can improve your creativity by how you work.
One song, one piece of paper. Just doodle.
The point of this exercise was to see what kind of things I created when listening to different types of music; trying not to think about anything too much – just to have a doodle to see if what you listen to affects your creativity.
I just sat down and had a list of shuffle songs playing straight after the other. Occasionally lyrics made me draw certain objects, but usually I started on one main drawing and added parts to it as the song went on.
This is my second monthly wallpaper, and this time it has been based around a Julius Caesar quote. After all, July was named after the Roman leader
