Blog

Stopdesign | Making the Absolute, Relative

once upon a time someone early on in the development of the web came up with the idea of making hyperlinks within a web page appear as a different colour to the rest of the text. Then at a later date (probably – i’m guessing now), arrived the concept of links appearing as a different colour if they had already been visited.

This is a useful feature as it allows you to see where you have been, therefore stops you going round in circles in your endless search for information. Or maybe when you are in a bored haze clicking frenzy like I was at lunchtime.

When CSS 1.0 arrived, we were given the ability to control these styles, and many designers opted to make visited links look the same as non-visited links, just for consistency, thus removing this once useful feature.

At time of writing I have left my visited links to show their default colours, and I have to admit it does make the page look a bit ugly, and I was wondering what to do about it, when I saw this idea of applying a background image for visited links [link removed], making them look sort of crossed-out.(Tip: click on one of the links then go back to the page where the link was).

Nice, might blatantly copy that idea one day.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of Delphi recently, and needed a little project to get my teeth into so have been building a little windows app which will let me browse and preview jpeg images in a directory, select one or more then create thumbnail and web size jpegs, plus the XHTML and CSS to display them in a basic gallery.

Of course there are already a million apps which do just this, but I have tailored this one to make the output exactly as I want it, and therefore now have a really quick and convenient way of selecting images from my camera CF card and getting them into a web gallery in a matter of seconds (OK maybe minutes) with no need to open photoshop or HTML editor.

english grass shouldn’t look this colour:-

I found it in an orange book with some kind of pixellated smurf on the cover.

I feel like the blanks have been filled in now, it really is worth getting hold of a copy if you are a web designer or involved in web design projects in any way.

My web design knowledge so far has been gained by example and by being thrown into projects at the deep end, but this book makes you stop and look at the process of designing websites from the ground up. Many of the projects I have worked on in the past, particularly when working for a large fast moving agency, started with a graphic design in photoshop, then we used old skool “slice and dice” to deconstruct the design and the used string and gaffer tape to put it back together to masquerade as a web site.

It didn’t help that the team was divided into designers and site builders. The designers, though very good at graphic design, barely knew how to open dreamweaver, let alone use HTML and CSS. The site builders weren’t allowed to do any design. It didn’t work.

I have decided that I will stop evangelizing about using CSS from now on, unless someone pays me to do it in the form of consultancy. I think I am better off attempting to lead by example, (although i’m certainly not a brilliant designer so maybe that won’t work!). I am tempted to list a final rant about the misconception that sites designed and built using web standards all look boring, but I wont. It’s all in the book.

interesting article on the BBC site about spam, which is apparently 25 years old this weekend (spam, not the article).

It’s been one of those bright! gloomy! bright! days. The view from the office window changes everytime you look up.

When WAP fell flat on its face in the UK, the idea of using a mobile phone for email and internet access being more popular than PC internet access seemed absurd. They are over two years ahead in Japan and according to this guardian unlimited article email and internet access via mobile phone is becoming more popular than PC internet. When you look at the price of a wireless equipped PC compared to that of a state of the art 3G phone it suddenly makes sense. Sure many people use PCs for more than email and internet, but if you don’t, why go to the trouble of purchasing and looking after a large power hungry unreliable, noisy PC when you can do it all from a phone?

I suppose many people were disappointed by the WAP experience, because they had already used the internet on a PC and the monotone/slow/unreliable/non-existent alternative was a flop. Even the 3G experience may seem lame to regular PC internet users, but the difference in Japan is that many people have only ever used the mobile phone versions, because they are more affordable and convenient than PC’s.

I’ll always have a PC because I need it to make a living, but it still seems absurd that I have at home a noisy, slow old dinosaur of a PC humming and crunching away in the corner which I only really use to check my email and look at the news headlines while I eat my breakfast.