Books & Media Website
We launched a new website a few weeks ago for a new venture, Books & Media.
I wrote a blog about the ampersand a while back at the time I was working on the logo, I had been quite keen to use Bickham Script Pro italic but it didn’t quite work out so I used Baskerville italic. The main font is Frutiger Linotype.
Aside from the web design and logo I also created some business cards.
CSS3 Selectors
Just been reading this great article, CSS 3 Selectors Explained, over at the 456 Barrea Street website.
Been using CSS 3 on an in-house project I’m working on but very much with the future in mind. The article is actually from early 2006 which I think demonstrates how slowly things are moving on with CSS 3, it is still a working draft I know, and the popularity of Internet Explorer is hindering adoption too, but the selectors I’ve been using are really useful.
Interesting to note that, according to the Ars Technica website, the market share for IE dropped below 60% in April 2010, whilst Google Chrome is on the rise with a 6.73% market share which is already nearly as much as Safari (4.72%) and Opera (2.3%) combined. Firefox currently has a 24.59% share.
The support for more advanced CSS in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera is pretty good but until IE6 and IE7 die a death I can’t see me using many of the new selectors.
Whilst we’re talking about browsers I was also interested to note that Mozilla, Opera and Google have announced a new collabarotive project entitled WebM to develop a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone.
I also discovered some useful CSS Help Sheets at gosqared.com.
Daunt Books Website Screen Shot
It’s been a long time in the making, just over 3 years to be precise, but my latest design for Ehaus, the Daunt Book website, has finally gone live. Some elements of the user interface are quite different to most bookshop websites and on the whole I think they work well.
They’ve also made a commendable effort to create their own bibliographic data for the books, largely the reason the site has taken so much time to develop.
Iphone Screen Shot
Just created a Mobify.me version of the blog. I found it easy to use, interfaces pretty well with WordPress.
Policy Press screen shot
My latest work for Ehaus, The Policy Press web site. We also made a WordPress blog for them.
Screenshot of the new Ehaus website design
Been working away on a new design for the Ehaus website over the last couple of months and am pleased it has now launched. Pretty happy with this one, and a definite improvement on the last design, some nice jQuery touches and I think it showcases what we do really well.
Screen shot of colorbox pop-up window
I came across a lightbox style plugin for jQuery called Colorbox, developed by a designer/developer called Jack Moore over at Colorpowered. It looks great, there are some nice parameters that you can set, I especially like the fixed width or height, and you can also include video, external and inline content as well as other sites in an iframe.
I’ve looked at lots of different variations including Fancybox, Greybox, Thickbox as well as Lightbox itself but I think this one is the best I’ve seen.
It is also released under the MIT License. Good work Jack!
Browser Pain - IE Testing
Microsoft has released some new software that will be of interest to fellow web designers and developers out there, a programme called SuperPreview.
It’s a standalone application (in beta at the moment) that enables you to see how your websites will look across different versions of Internet Explorer without having to set up a Virtual Machine to run IE6, or another computer dedicated to running IE6.
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My latest work for Ehaus, the Galaxy British Book Awards website.
The 2009 Nibbies Web Site
Some nice touches on this site, plenty of jQuery on the front page including an image rotator, an accordion and a carousel. There’s also a pop-up box for embeded video files. I also set up a blog for the award.
PS. Guardian launches Open Platform, enabling users to build applications with the Guardian.
Death to IE 6
Got an email from iStockphoto today saying they are withdrawing support for Internet Explorer 6 from 2010. This reminded me of a statement I read from 37signals some months ago that they were phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6. I read this initial article with much interest as this browser causes me an enormous amount of stress, unbelievably however, it still has a market share of around 20%, although I wouldn’t be surprised if half of that is developers and designers looking at page views over and over until they’ve fixed a problem.
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