Tidying up my server I found a front-end style switcher lying around I’d not used much. It seems very simple and pleasant to use, so thought I’d blog it here, as a demo, before deleting the original forever…
Continue reading Simple stylesheet switcher for WordPressDesign
Hillary Clinton’s old website
On Sunday, Hillary Rodham Clinton announced she would definitely like to be the next President of the United States of America. Before that announcement HillaryClinton.com looked like this: a holding page linking to the website of her official office.
Blue, a notoriously popular colour in web design, seems deployed here according to colour theory:always reassuringly safe, friendly and almost frivolous when light, while the darker blue brings a more serious tone. The background gradient gives an abstract sense of a horizon; the ground and the sky; don’t stop thinking about tomorrow. We’re meant to be reassured. The contrasting darker blue used for the ‘Hillary’ headline – really a logo – fits it quite well: we’re on first name terms with Mrs Clinton, but we’re still encouraged to take her name seriously as a strong and powerful proposition. The colour contrast emphasises the seriousness of ‘Hillary’ as a concept. We’re meant to be impressed.
The gradient is deployed as a background image rather than modern css: old-fashioned but fine for a lightweight single page site. There’s a technical fail, however, whereby the bottom curve of the ‘y’ descender in the logo (also deployed as an image) has been truncated by over-zealous cropping. This could have been avoided with modern web typography – or a steadier hand.
But never mind because the typography itself is interesting. Continue reading Hillary Clinton’s old website
CSS for real people
IN a new article on A List Apart, Håkon Wium Lie, the “father of CSS” and CTO of Opera explores how new devices “force us to rethink web design”, as scrolling gives way to app-like paged gestures, and figures will float in multi-column layouts, and to what extent this can be achieved in pure CSS.
While CSS figures and paged gestures are a little while off browser support yet, multi-column layouts are available now (vendor-prefixed), and Håkon gives an example.
To me, this is where CSS code morphs into poetry: one succinct line of code scales from the narrowest phone to the widest TV, from the small print to text for the visually impaired. There is no JavaScript, media queries, or expensive authoring tool involved. There is simply one highly responsive line of code.Håkon Wium Lie
Animation and UX
Modern CSS opens up new possibilities for designing animated web user-interfaces, with the @keyframes rule and css transform and transition properties.
A List Apart recently published UI Animation and UX: A Not-So-Secret Friendship, outlining good design patterns for using animation, and includes a number of useful links for further reading, including information on the performance cost to the browser of these new-ish features. .