Transcending CSS | The Fine Art of Web Design by Andy Clarke
‘A manifesto to transcend the web of today.’
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- Introduction: Dave Shea
- Foreword: Molly E. Holzschlag
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Buy from Amazon
Catch Andy Clarke on DVD in three new For A Beautiful Web titles covering topics including “Designing with CSS”, “Designing with Microformats”; and “Designing web accessibility”.
Published by New Riders and available from Peachpit and Amazon.
Today, RIM unveiled its latest mobile browser. It runs WebKit making every mobile platform except one run that rendering engine. With that in mind, I’d like you to try this experiment.
I asked: Web designers are cool, but private detectives are cooler. No argument, but why can’t you be both?
The answer? You can.
When the W3C announced that it was retreating from XHTML2 after years in the trenches, propagandists trumpeted that advocacy of XHTML had been foolish. With HTML5 again mired in corporate politics, egotism, squabbles and petty disagreements, it is easy to see why people are questioning if using or advocating HTML5 now is foolish too? At least until all parties reach some kind of armistice.
I’m in the middle of preparing materials for a new book, “Hardboiled Web Design”. To demonstrate CSS3 selectors, transforms and transitions I’m putting together a page in the demonstration site, “It’s Hardboiled”. That’s where you come in.
Always an example of the best the web design industry has to offer, this year 24 ways, the advent calendar for web geeks, has its focus firmly set on moving your web design forward.
(On 24th December 2009, the site that this letter refers to was replaced.)
Writing this week about eating accessibility humble pie and using CSS attribute substring selectors, a comment by clever Craig Cook sent my imagination reeling.
We all make mistakes. Right? Particularly when it comes to accessibility. Often in the rush to ready a site for launch, we forget to check the details that can make a world of difference. That’s what I did when I launched the latest For A Beautiful Web.
Changingman, a liquid three column CSS layout with a fixed positioned and width centre column, released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license. (This entry was originally posted on 23rd November 2005 and has been updated in 2009.)
Relly Annett-Baker on first draft copy for CannyBill.
Now that our For A Beautiful Web workshops calendar is closed for the year, it was time to push live a redesign of that site with a focus on my new DVDs. This was a chance for me to play, both with HTML5 and CSS transforms and transitions to spice up the interface.
Web forms often ask visitors for non-essential information, but long and complicated forms can hinder a sales or sign-up process. Wouldn’t it be cool to give users the option to hide these optional fields at their own discretion. (This entry was originally posted in 2004 and has been updated in 2009.)
Before we send over our design files to the chaps at CannyBill, first a run through of the browsers that we have tested in the new design and some musings about what browser testing actually means today, in the face of an ever more diversified browser and device landscape.
With the first phase of the CannyBill redesign process drawing to a close, I would like to say a huge thank-you to the CannyBill team for encouraging a public, open design process and to everyone who has commented and tweeted their helpful suggestions.
When is it the right thing to do not to attempt to reinvent a well established, tried and tested design pattern or convention. This question has come up while I have been designing the CannyBill prices and plans page.
A fascinating look at Relly Annett-Baker‘s process of writing copy for CannyBill and finding its voice.
It’s not everyday that I get to work with a client that completely gets why it’s important to push the progressive enrichment boundaries by using HTML5 and the kind of advanced CSS styling that I teach at my workshops. Luckily, the CannyBill team do more than get it. I’d like to share a little of the HTML5 and CSS that I’m using for this project.
How the Wired Magazine user interface will look on the iPad or other devices.
— Expect Hardboiled Web Design to be like no other CSS book you’ve ever seen.
I’ve seen Andy a couple of times in the past and kind of felt he was a bit ‘marmite’ and it was clear from both the verbal feedback during the talk and the Twitter stream that some were keen to disagree with his views but like he said – that’s OK.
At Clearleft, our designers do not mark up their own designs. We require that they can all c ode well, but they never touch a line of production HTML. By the same notion, our front end developers – the ones who do code up the designs – never push a pixel of design, but we do expect them to have a basic understanding of design principles.
Fun as it is to take a trip to London/Brighton for a web conference it does start to get expensive so the fact that some local boys put on something for us Northerners was really cool.
— Couldn’t agree more. Speak The Web was a triumph.
If you care about how the content on your site is presented I think you get the best results with a designer that knows how to code.
To deem it neces sary to write HTML to be a good web designer is really quite dis respect ful to experts in those sub sets of web design who never go near any HTML, yet have equal value to bring to a design project.
Start asking your clients, “Would you like me to make sure your new site works on Blackberry, iPhone and iPad or spend time hacking for IE6?” I bet I know which one they’ll choose.
From January 2003 but still an illuminating read from Simon St. Laurent.
There’s nothing terribly revolutionary about MTV’s new logo – described aptly by the network as a ‘refresh’ rather than a redesign.
A thoughtful article from Jonathan Christopher on when he feels it appropriate for him to use progressive CSS.
Font-stacks created after considering the font-share percentage on both Mac and Windows platforms and then checked in browser for x-height and other issues (like: readability).
Some people would have you believe that you aren’t reading this because it’s not ‘above the fold’.
— Sending this to my client from hell.
This is why CSS was invented. Read the tutorial.
This weekend saw the minting of not one but two new elements. The summary element (not the summary attribute on the table element) goes inside the details element:
There’s so much to think about when building a web site that it is easy to leave things out, or forget about important considerations. One of the most important of these is accessibility, an area of web design that can seem very daunting.
Peachpit have released a short section from my Designing Web Accessibility DVD on YouTube.
Remy Sharp talking to Boagworld.
— Don’t miss out on your place on jQuery for Designers with Remy Sharp workshop in London on May 14th 2010. Tickets on-sale now.
Want to see how FF Meta renders in IE 6 on Windows XP? How about Skolar in Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu? We’ve got it covered. Just navigate to any font on Typekit and click on the “Browser Samples” tab.
— More from the Typekit blog. The almost added by me as there is currently no Typekit support for Opera.
An archive of blog entries since 2004 on subjects including CSS, web standards, accessibility, design and development.