Category: Design

After the recent and now-infamous WordPress hidden articles debacle, the notion of using negative positioning to hide content from visual browsers has gained a new complication to consider. Google (and other search engines, I presume) have explicit rules forbidding this kind of content “cloaking,” but as yet they obviously don’t have an automated means of… Continue reading More on Hiding Skip Links

The “skip navigation” link has become nearly ubiquitous in standards-based web design, due largely to Zeldman’s teachings (see pg. 200… you have the book, right?). In a nutshell, it’s simply a link to an ID’d element or named anchor on the current page that allows a visitor to jump right to the meat, bypassing whatever… Continue reading Accessibly Hiding Skip Links

I’m now running WordPress 1.5 Strayhorn, which is leaps and bounds cooler than 1.2 (Mingus), which was already pretty damn cool. I won’t go into detailed coverage of all the new features because others have already covered that subject. I will, however, mention my two favorites: Pages and Themes. WP1.5 allows for the easy creation… Continue reading Upgrade Post-mortem

Dave Shea has written an excellent introduction to CMYK, mainly aimed at web designers used to creating for the RGB screen. It’s a handy overview of the CMYK color model and why your work doesn’t look the same on paper as it does on the monitor. Dave’s article offers some rules of thumb to follow… Continue reading Pixel, Meet Dot

Greg “Airbag” Storey is running a design contest to produce a logo for his friend’s new company, with the designer of the chosen logo set to receive an iPod shuffle, an Airbag Industries t-shirt, and a stack of Jewelboxes. But even more notable than the contest is the heated comment thread over at the ‘Bag… Continue reading Contested

I’ve been on the standards train for two years or so. In that time, the neurons and mesons of my development habits have been so thoroughly remapped that I have a really hard time thinking in old-school table-based ways. The transition to web standards brings on a fundamental change in how one approaches design challenges.… Continue reading Reverting to Pasta

This weekend I finished the much-nagged-for redesign of Moment Ago, the weblog of Jolene Spry, PR pimpadelic cyberhottie gamer geekstress extraordinaire, who is also (amazingly enough) my best friend. I got her into blogging a few months back and set her up with WordPress. She’s got a design background, but primarily dealing with Flash, so… Continue reading Mama’s Got a Brand New Blog

Ars Technica launched a new design today, with a much-needed change to their color scheme. Black text on a light gray background is infinitely more readable than the old white-on-black migraine-inducing site they’ve had for years. Previously, the only way I could stand to read their content was by highlighting the text (which inverted the… Continue reading Some New Redesigns

I’ve read a lot of articles and blog postings about the advantages of web standards, and the techniques and strategies for employing them. But in all my reading I haven’t come across an article that specifically addresses the issue of using standards in a team environment. Building a standards-compliant site when faced with a team… Continue reading Practicing Standards in a Non-Standard World

Some years back MicroSoft did an amazing thing: they developed and released a version of Internet Explorer for MacOS. They embraced the Enemy, though it was hardly an altruistic move, merely part of their strategy to crush Netscape once and for all and to establish a toe-hold in the Mac world. But ulterior motives aside,… Continue reading IE5/Mac Annoyances