Several months ago, I spoke at Refresh Seattle. Kenny Meyers came. We met and became friends. For months, he has bothered me to write a blog post on the topic I spoke about, rehashing my slides and presentation. For months, I ignored him. So, the bastard wrote the blog post himself.
And it’s good. Check it out. Visit site »
If you use Django and Omnigraffle and find yourself mocking up Django admin screens, this could be useful. Visit site »
Safari is probably the most reliable browser out there when it comes to rendering things as a standards-aware developer would expect, but there are those rare times when you need to target it specifically with some unique rules. For those cases, this article will point you in the right direction. Visit site »
Friend of Blue Flavor, Kenny Meyers, has a blog. Its first post is titled, “Peaxal.com is up. Fuck you.” It’s funny. Kenny’s a smart and witty young dude who’s also a talented writer — this is a blog to watch. Visit site »
The wonderful Paul Boag from Headscape interviewed me for the latest episode of Boagworld, almost certainly the best web design podcast on the planet. We talk about my “controversial” views ...
Sara’s got a short little how-to on using clipping and transparency in web design to create some screens over photos and other similar layout options. Good stuff! Visit site »
So it appears that, short of a set of stone tablets carried down from the hills of Mountain View, we do have a fairly clear answer. Using CSS image replacement in a responsible way, where the image truthfully represents the content it’s replacing, is safe to use. The simple act of hiding text from users is not enough to get your site banned from Google’s index.
I think most of us have always suspected non-shady use of image replacement would be fine by Google, but now we (mostly) know for sure. Thanks, Dave! Visit site »
Talk about scratching your own itch… Visit site »
In my experience, most in-house web teams basically employ two types of people: designers and developers. Sure, some people call them different things, and there are definitely exceptions, but generally ...
Maura is the latest Django geek to go all tumblelog-style with her latest blog design. It looks great! Check it out. Visit site »
Bryan’s post on getting bent over and screwed by a client, inspired by some of my tweets from this morning. Good stuff, and a nice discussion follows. Somehow, we need to teach folks how to be better clients. It’s not really their fault, but it’s becoming more and more obvious to me that a lot of people have no idea how to be a good client for a designer (and being a good client is in their best interest — it’s how they get our best work). Visit site »
WebKit now includes support for gradients specified in CSS. The syntax looks a bit confusing for us designerly types, but massive kudos to the WebKit team for continuing to embrace the “browser wars” mentality, offering exciting new toys for designers and developers to play with, while at the same time maintaing interoperability with other browsers. Now, if we could just get Opera, Mozilla, and Microsoft on board, we’d probably see some fast and furious innovation in the CSS arena. Visit site »
Phil Thompson has a nice writeup on the Blue Flavor redesign where he questions the decisions to leave the company name out of the logo treatment, as well as the lack of a mini-description of what it is we do on the homepage. These are very valid points, but I think he’s justifies these design decisions himself when he says:
There is also the possibility that the due to (some of) Blue Flavou’s [sic] staff’s industry profiles, their core clients could be very clued-up on what they do and therefore don’t need it spelled out.
This is definitely true. Probably 95% of our work comes from clients who already know who we are and what we do, and already have a good impression of us based on reputation. These clients tend to be the ones we like working for the best, too; they respect us from the start, so they’re more likely to give us more creative freedom. So, in the end, I don’t think these decisions will hurt us. But, Phil is totally in the right to question them, as the same decision definitely wouldn’t work for every agency. Visit site »
For the past several weeks we’ve been working on a redesign of BlueFlavor.com — and now it’s live. Keith and Kevin and mostly responsible for the design. Nick and Tom did some IA work, Tom and Kevin did the front-end development, and I did the back-end development.
Of particular interest is the awesome posters we’ve commissioned as an interesting new way to showcase some of our work. The artists we’ve used so far have been freaking great, and we’re looking forward to doing more.
For the curious, BlueFlavor.com is now powered by the same Django-based CMS that powers jeffcroft.com. Visit site »
My good friend Sarah Harrison (aka sourjayne) has started a blog about her UX research and thoughts. Good stuff so far. Check it out! Visit site »
EveryBlock takes over A List Apart for an issue, with Wilson Miner’s awesome piece on using web standards to create data visualizations like bar charts and sparklines, and Paul Smith showing you how to roll your own custom mapping interface. Great issue. Visit site »
Yet another front-end web framework, consisting largely of CSS (but this one also has some JavaScript). I haven’t really looked into it yet, so I can’t really comment on it.
For my tastes, I’ve yet to see the “perfect CSS framework,” (Blueprint’s first release was the closest — since then, it’s moved away from many of my preferences), but I’m really happy to see the concept taking off, since I wrote about it in A List Apart. Despite some negativity from other prominent members of the web standards community, I still really believe in the ideas of code re-use and standardization amongst teams on things like class names and markup conventions.
It still baffles me that some of the same people who go on and on about microformats don’t want to see standardization in class name for other things. Weird. Visit site »
Avalonstar is back with a vengeance, baby! Congrats, Bryan! Visit site »
Nathan Smith talks about the 960 Grid System CSS “framework” (I say in quotes, since that word seems divisive when applied to CSS) he recently released. It all looks very impressive to me, and I’m quite tempted to use it over Blueprint. Blueprint has changed several things since the work Nathan, Christian, and I did at the Lawrence Journal-World, and much of it is not necessarily to my liking (that’s not to say it’s bad — just not now I want it). Nathan’s 960 is a bit closer to what I want, grid-wise (and is a bit lighter weight, as it doesn’t really bother with typography). I’ll definitely be giving it a closer look in the near future. Visit site »
The awesome Nathan Smith has released a CSS framework for grids. It’s very similar to Blueprint, but uses some different naming conventions and a 12 or 16 column default grid, instead of Blueprint’s 24 columns. Looks very useful. Nice work! Visit site »
Nice redesign of NYMag.com — I have some small beefs in places, but mostly I think this is really well done and fits their brand nicely. Visit site »
October 1st, 2008–October 3rd, 2008 in London, England
August 18th, 2008–August 19th, 2008 in San Francisco, CA
June 23rd, 2008–June 24th, 2008 in Boston, MA
Wow, it’s hard to believe South By Southwest Interactive, the annual geek-fest for interactive professionals in Austin, TX, is only a few days away. We at Blue Flavor are ...
Cameron kicks off what looks to be a really good series on creating extensible interfaces using CSS. Visit site »
Paul Annett of Clearleft shows you how he put together the cool parallax effect on the Silverback site. Visit site »
Smashing Magazine has a nice selection of website navigation examples. Some clever stuff, here. Nathan’s awesome playgroundblues flyout tabs get a special mention. Visit site »
Rob Goodlatte and Dan Romero use Twitter to conduct brief online polls. Fun idea, fun site, and nice implementation. Word of warning to would-be parallaxers: I believe think effect is this close to jumping the shark, and I’ve only seen it on like four sites. Rob and Dan do it really well, but still… Visit site »