Brilliant Thinking

It’s an all-too-common conversation when a developer gets his first look at a graphic designer’s masterpiece:

Designer: “It must be pixel perfect. This widget does this, and that widget does that. Oh, by the way we want this bit to stay fixed here on the page, irrespective of the content that goes on (which we haven’t seen a draft of yet) and the client mentioned something about standards compliance. Oh, and search engines.”

Apologies for the paraphrasing, but (as you will have seen from some of my previous posts) designers often don’t design with the web in mind, and because the web is a fluid medium the conversion process of a design also needs to accommodate a little fluidity of its own to embrace the benefits of the web. This means that the design produced may need to change a little to make the website work in practice - some things such as usability and functionality spring to mind which a design may not often lend itself to immediately, despite how wonderful it looks on paper (yes, designers still review website designs with clients on paper) and the promise it holds. The developer usually then has to shoehorn in additional code to accommodate the designers brief as well as the clients functional desires and try to help the actual user who may have been overlooked in the process, and deal with typography issues where fonts on paper hold up to readability at smaller font sizes than they do on screen.

Well, it looks like Andy Clark of “Stuff and Nonsense” has done something about it. He has just published a book called “Transcending CSS: The fine art of web design”. It is a very visual book and looks set to be essential reading for designers who wish to understand more about visual approaches to converting their design into working code (CSS specifically), and developers who are looking for new paradigms for converting pre-authored designs into working and workable websites.

About the book:

The web has changed, and so has the art of creating web sites. Few visual designers are natural programmers, and as a result, visualizing how to work with markup, CSS and a range of programmatic techniques to create beautiful design is difficult.

To make things more complicated, most web design teaching materials focus on the technical rather than the creative. Countless resources and guides focus on semantics, compliance, and validity—and while all important—mean nothing to the creative designer who wants to impress his or her clients and employers with exceptional design without worrying that the way they approach the design will be compromised by creativity-limiting technical issues. So how do creative designers learn to be artistic yet functional? With Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design.

For more information about the book and how to source a copy from an Amazon near you, click the book cover above.

Recommended reading!

Contents

The hosting is the space where the website lives. It also includes the provision of email services and webmail facilities so that you can check email wherever you may be. Although we prefer Linux for reliability in the web environment and offer our own hosting facilities, the choice of hosting should be dictated by your business requirements - performance, scaleability, etc.

Please also refer to our longer article: Types of Hosting.

I have wondered for some time about why Flash never really caught on with its concept of Rich Media Applications. After all, it provided an application-like interface built around ActionScript (an OO JavaScript-esque language) with XML pipes long before AJAX became popular. However, the answer appeared to be right in front of me - there are less Flash developers out there than there are JavaScript developers. So has AJAX “won”? Time will tell as an elegant solution for web application development, but it certainly looks like the best option we have today.

It also helped by reading this article from which the above table (showing other alternatives) was snaffled.