Thought Factory

This is just another reminder to anyone subscribed to this feed that the blog has now moved over to AtlVisions.com/blog. The new rss feed address is http://feeds.feedburner.com/AltVisionsBlog.

I have decided that I have a bit of a scattered web presence so I’m trying to consolidate things a bit. To help with this, my blog will now be integrated into my Alt Visions site. To go directly to the new blog head to AltVisions.com/blog

There was a lot of valuable information offered in this year’s 24 Ways articles but there were three posts that particularly struck me, reviving my excitement in web design and causing me to make fundamental changes in the way I create websites: Meagan Fisher’s Post on creating mock-ups in the browser, Andy Clarke’s Post on designing for modern browsers, and Drew McLellan’s Post on rgba color. My aim for this post is to simply explain what was covered in these posts and how it affects me. I will be writing a follow up post that goes into more detail about how I have begun to implement these things and what the results have been like.

I think Andy Clarke’s post affected me the most. I am pretty sure I have run across this idea before that we shouldn’t be designing for the lowest common denominator (IE) but Andy’s narrative just kind of hit home for me and pushed me to start practicing this method. To tell you the truth I feel quite liberated now that I can feel comfortable going to town using some of the CSS3 features like rgba color, box-shadow, and border-radius available in modern browsers like firefox, safari, and chrome and then just basically forgetting about internet explorer. Not to say that I completely neglect IE, but I’m just simply not going to bend over backwards anymore trying to use alternative techniques to make it look like other browsers. I now understand that it is okay for websites to look slightly different and that these new features will just work as a bonus to people who use more advanced browsers.

Drew’s post kind of went hand in hand with Andy’s because it simply explained how to use one the new features in CSS3 that IE doesn’t recognize. RGBA Color simply allows you to set a transparency value to any element in your html and it is incredibly useful. No more will I have to go into photoshop to create transparent tiles for every differently colored background element, I can just simply specify the rgb color value along with the alpha value in one line of css and voila, super awesome transparencies! Not only does this technique make life easier but it also speeds up page load times by reducing http requests and overall data transfer amounts.

As for Meagan Fisher’s post, I haven’t really had the chance to use her idea with a client yet but I have this feeling that it is going to make the design process much easier. Jumping over photoshop and actually creating my designs as I code is a brilliant idea. This method forces/allows me to start off creating clean base structures for my websites where I can focus on content layout and fundamental usability issues. This starting point also lets me bring the client in early on in the design process so that they feel included in the development, hopefully resulting in fewer dramatic changes 5 minutes before launch time. In addition, if there are changes, I will have the luxury, in most cases, of changing a few lines of CSS rather than recreating layers, drop shadows, rounded corners, etc in photoshop. I will, of course, still continue to start my design process in the sketch book and rely on photoshop and illustrator for graphic elements but I think the over all progression of the design will be greatly simplified.

I slacked off a bit and I think I missed a week or two of the design inspiration posts but I’m finally back on track. Enjoy.