Right Brain

I recently competed in UnmatchedStyle’s CSSOff competition where frontend developers each took a crack at marking up the same Photoshop document. Submissions are to be judged based on a list of parameters including: semantics, resource optimization, legacy browser support and general code cleanliness. We were encouraged to use HTML5 and tasked to support browsers as old as IE6. Here are some observations I made during and since the competition.

Here is a quick tip that comes in handy for me all the time. I like to work out ideas analog. A frustration I have with notebooks, in general, is that lined and graph paper tend to be of inferior paper quality than sketchbooks. My solution is to create my own graph or ruled paper and place them behind my sketchbook sheets so that I can see the lines through the page in the same way a calligrapher would. Ruled or graph paper is easier to create with Illustrator than you may think.

While it is nice that new smartphones can render virtually any website reasonably well, we are remiss to not take context into account. Is “reasonably well” really your end goal? I have been dipping my toe into making this site more optimized for mobile consumption by serving up some size delineated styles. I wanted to share a couple of notes on my approach.

I have heard on more than one occasion, as a reason to not use drupal as a cms, that all drupal sites look like… well… drupal sites. I am not exactly clear on what is meant by this. I have pressed the issue a few times, asking for examples of drupalish characteristics, to little avail. Which leads to my little experiment.

On multiple occasions the topic of “Where to start” with web design has come up. There are many blogs out there covering the topic of web design/ frontend development, here is a good start to creating the ultimate web design bookshelf.

I like the concept of productivity as much as the next guy (assuming the next guy isn’t David Allen). That said, I have recently returned from the torpor of spending large quantities of free time reading about productivity instead of actually getting things done.

I just stumbled upon some notes I took at FOWA, so this post is less than timely. Better late than never. There was copious amounts of wisdom to gather from this long weekend event, but there was one underlying theme that seemed to be woven into most, if not all, of the presentations. In the spirit of gross generalizations here is a synopsis of the most important theme to have been picked up at FOWA Miami 2008.

Hey Crime Stoppers, I just got back from attending a Photoshop seminar by Bert Monroy in Ft. Lauderdale. Monroy is an illustrator whose specialty is Photoshop and as he has been doing what he does for about as long as I have been alive, to say he knows his stuff is an understatement. More or less, I would recommend this seminar to most people, but I am not sure I was the target demographic.