A few months back I launched a long overdue redesign of this site. I’ve often thought of the content on my site as information layers, like the strata you would see in a cross section of the earth. Perhaps it’s an expression of my subconscious memories of growing up in the midwest where the earth and agriculture are a central part of life. Though I’ve long since moved away, the landscape still drives my aesthetic. Similarly, web pages stack content sections. A blog post, for example, would have a layer for the article, a layer for meta data like tags, and yet another layer for comments.
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I’m co-presenting with Leslie Jensen-Inman and Glenda Sims a workshop called “Dive Into the Modern Web” today at Web Directions US in Atlanta, GA. This workshop will help educators and self-guided learners get up to speed with the changing landscape of the modern Web.
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There’s a fair bit of tedium and redundancy that goes into the set up of a new site. Most web designers start with the same tasks like reseting all default margins, padding, and other values to a common baseline for cross-browser support, you define your layout, wrestle with type, maybe even set up a print style sheet. We often find ourselves repeating what we’ve already done many times over on other projects. Blueprint, a recently released CSS framework created by Norwegian student Olav Frihagen Bjorkoy, seeks to eliminate this common tedium by providing a concise set of style sheets that make setup and design quick and easy.
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I’m usually averse to blogging about things that are already hot topics of everyone else’s blog, but I think all of my students who read this blog should take a look at this recent post on Ajaxian. A web designer took a screen shot after adding content to a page or modifying the CSS, revealing and interesting look at the evolution of the web page development process. The screen shots are rolled into an animated Gif to show the design through time.
Yahoo! has a really nice style sheet that will reset all browser default rendering of padding, margins, fonts, etc. so you can build your style sheets for projects on a level playing field. This is going to prevent a lot of (though not all) cross-browser formatting issues as all browsers will get the same design instructions rather than inheriting default browser styles. Yahoo! has already done all of the cross browser testing to ensure that their reset style sheet forces all browsers to start on a consistent base.
Dynamic Drive has put together a nice collection of common CSS layouts that demonstrate positioning and floating methods. There are other collections that have been around for some time, but this one seems to have more variety than most. It’s a great way to learn about CSS positioning.
