Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Pass it on
Bryan in his journal Avalonstar has a rather nice post today entitled Spreading the knowledge. He retells the exprience of helping someone to make the right decision in a bookshop over some starter books into web world. The sentiment Bryan puts through this post is summed up by this quote :
"We
WSC Working Draft
Yesterday the WSC Working Draft for the WCAG 2.0 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0), was released in it’s latest working draft format. This builds on the June Working Draft with addressing of comments raised from this release. I decided to have a little nose around it and see what I could find. Of course, it contains the usual principles, guidelines, benefits and criterias. So what is in this version?
When is a variable not a variable
I have been reading online a lot lately about naming of variables. I thought that the old law of calling them something relevant was actually just an accepted norm now. I appear to have been wrong considering the amount of people that are writing about how this needs to be done. Either that or actually having a post or article on naming variables is some kind of hello world in development now. If that is the case hello world.
Psychic web design
Why does it sometimes feel like I need psychic powers to get what a client has inside their head into life? I am sure I am not the only designer that has felt like the are attempting to do some victorian mind reading palour trick. Thing is I lack the ability of slight of hand, don’t have any smoke screens, mirrors, beautiful assistants or any actual x-file psychic capabilities. This has been proven by the latest bout of mind melding which failed and resulted in a ground hog day of logo designs. I am not angry at the client, I guess maybe I should have focused more on the brief or listened better – then again when you are trying to please a group of people with as varied opinions as the village people’s dress sense; it can tend to result in a hit or miss affair.
Colour the web grey
With the opening of the web palette depending on your perspective you’d think that the web world would be a festival of colour. You’d be forgiven to think that designers would have gone mad in a frenzy of colour crazy. Why then do we all end up using grey so much? I myself have often been one of the grey lenses brigade. So why grey? I think it has something to do with the fact that it indeed goes with everything. It is also due to the “whitespace” kick back amongst designers after the heady days of rotating gif packed clipart sites. The use of grey is something that allows you to use a tone to balance out other colours in your site. Take a strong orange or green, compliment this on a white site with grey and you’ve got instance balance.
Labeling the world
A post today on 37 signals titled “Creatives”, has got me thinking about the way we label ourselves and have labels attached to us. This post focused on labeling designers as creative and others as not. The labeling of what is “creative” and what is not creative has always been something I have never been comfortable with. I think possibly this is partially because I fit the two “labels” of a designer and developer. It is also because I find the strict division of what is infact “creative” and what is not, often fails to realise beyond a visual creativity.
