December 20, 2005
Over the past nine months, I’ve been lucky enough to have an amazing learning opportunity at Silverpoint working alongside some incredibly talented people. While my role is primarily that of a designer, I had the opportunity to both design and produce a site for The John Carroll School, a local Catholic high school. It was a trial-by-fire experience that has drastly improved my coding process. While some of the people I work with are probably ready for me to stop bugging them and go back to designing, I really enjoyed the process, and I’m thrilled with how it turned out.
December 14, 2005
Funny how a few days of a bare-bones web site will get one motivated. The design is back, and while it looks mostly the same, all of the underlying CSS has changed. With the assistance of Clagnut and Position is Everything’s The Search for the One True Layout I’ve gone full-steam with ems, a unit of measurement I have heretofore shunned as unreliable. While I still have some questions, I’ve read enough, and now understand enough, to embrace them wholeheartedly.
The benefit to you, my loyal reader, is that the site’s layout is now elastic, rather than fixed. My anal-retentive nature when it comes to typography still prevents me from embracing the liquid layout trend. I feel like ems and elastic layouts are a perfect compromise to the epic struggle of design integrity vs. user choice.
You should find, if you’re browsing with a semi-modern browser (Safari, Firefox, IE 6—yes, IE 6!) that you can use your browser’s text sizing controls to resize the whole layout. Go ahead; give it a shot. You may find a few bits of weirdness in the masthead while I fully wrap my brain around this new concept, but on the whole, you should find that the whole page sizes up or down pretty beautifully.
So, here we have it, the first major change to this site’s architecture since its first foray into standards-based design in early 2004. Here’s hoping that this much-improved method works for me equally as long.
December 13, 2005
Issues, it seems, about with the new style sheet. No point in stringing up lights while the porch is caving in, though. Far too busy with work I get paid for at the moment, so I’m going to let the code breathe for a while. And I’ll take another stab at this once the Big Project is launched on Wednesday.
December 9, 2005
The time has come again when I decide to make my life just that little bit harder by making design changes to the site for no apparent reason. Sure, there are reasons; they just aren’t apparent.
Clearly, this time I was achin’ for some serifs. Those who’ve been around for a while might recognize the current design as a bit of nostalgia. While all web designers do the font-family shuffle (Verdana, Times, Arial, Georgia, Lucida, rinse, repeat), it didn’t take me long to come crawling back to my old favorite, Georgia. Everything old, as they say, is new again.
I’ve also introduced drop caps with the magic of adjacent sibling selectors and pseudo-classes. One caveat, as always, is an odd display bug in Firefox that I’m still battling. If you see a drop cap with a ridiculous amount of padding, know I am developing a battle plan as we, err, I speak.
All that aside, enjoy. And please let me know if you find something I really messed up.
Update: My choices may have proved prescient, it seems. Cameron Moll writes today “I, for one, am beginning to tire of [Lucida] already much as I did Verdana a few years back, but its usage is showing no signs of slowing.” Ahead of the curve, baby.
Update: Not so fast, eh. I’m working on it.
December 7, 2005
While the snow in Baltimore over the past few days has been a fun anomaly for me, I’m satisfied now and don’t mind if we don’t get snow again for a month or so. No dice, though, because now it looks like we’re getting it again this week, probably more than last time.
I can see how this gets old.
I find myself a bit paranoid though that it’s going to snow in the days before Christmas. I only get a little bit of time off for the holidays, and if I’m sitting in BWI dealing with a cancelled flight on the day before Christmas Eve, the Deparment of Homeland Security is going to have to come haul me away.
So, to the locals: does it often snow around Christmas? And how hard does it have to be coming down for flights to start being cancelled at BWI? I’m flying Southwest to Birmingham, Alabama, so unless the gods are really conspiring against me, there’s not going to be a problem at the other end.
December 2, 2005
When I was a freshmen in college, I lived in the dorms. My roommate was a nice guy and a decent person to live with. He never bought toilet paper, though. Because I was massively passive-aggressive when I was in college (still battling the demons I now so willingly embrace, no doubt) I decided that he wasn’t going to have any more of my toilet paper. So, when I’d buy it, I’d hide it above the acoustic ceiling tiles in the bathroom. It was really creepy though, because I’d see him go in and take a shit, but there wasn’t any toilet paper anywhere visible in the bathroom.
I can really only think of three options.
- He didn’t wipe his ass after he took a shit.
- He was smuggling in his own TP and I didn’t notice.
- He knew that I was hiding the TP; he found it; and he mocked me while he wiped his ass with it.
I never figured out which it was, but boy, I’d be interested to know.
And, if he happens to be reading this, sorry, dude.
