As I generally earn my keep these days playing with Flash, I thought it only fair to dedicate a large portion of the site to a flash applet that in some way integrates with the design of the site. Well, after thinking long and hard about what exactly the flash applet should do, I have condensed it’s job down to three essential functions. Firstly, to play music and movies – this is a multimedia site after all – secondly, to suck in RSS feeds and display them visually one at a time, and thirdly to integrate with the html and AJAX so that it can display relevant animations depending on where you are on the site. …
Day 010 : Typographic Baselines
After coding multiple sites this week and evangelising about fixed baselines last week, I have found myself constantly having to do irritating fiddly maths or copy-pasting previously worked out styles. The problem with this is two fold – firstly, many of my new projects are based on a 22 pixel baseline (rendering much of my old code obsolete) and secondly, headlines vary in sizes on every site dependent on the visual aesthetics of the content. …
Day 009 : Content!
Having been focused on the layout and aesthetic of the site, I realised that a huge volume of content is still unavailable, offline, or has expired! So to ensure it isn’t a case of style over substance I have been hard at work trying to find active links, projects and scans of work that I have been involved with. If at any point we have worked together and you are sad that the work is not on here – drop us a line and I will try to accommodate it! I have found a whole plethora of products that I will have to add to the site, although I am still unsure about the inclusion of my patented sick bag! It’s cool and that, what with the handles and all, but it’s still a sick bag…
Day 007 : Technical Evolution
Unlike my previous site, I want this new theme to work dynamically, with only relevant information changing, rather than having to refresh the entire site on each click. I want this for a number of reasons, least of all to make a smoother interface for a simple site, but also so that the entire site can become aware of changes in realtime. The large empty space above the navigation bar is for a large scaling flash applet that I am currently coding, and this will communicate with the javascript code in the html to act reactively to each page selection. …
Day 006 : Content Royal Family
If content is king, then content layout must be the royal family. Which bits of information are important and how do they relate together? As the site already has lots of content, it is now time to decide how much of this info to show at once, and how best to navigate between it. …
Day 005 : Security
So my site was down for the last 24 hours - and throug no fault of my own. I logged on to to find my homepage had been replaced with a phishing site and that I no longer had FTP access or SSH! By tracking the data from where it came from, I found that my DNS had been hijacked and that it was pointing my domain to somebody else’s server. Not good news at all. But here we are, 24 hours later. It turns out that the owners of my domain reparked it as a mistake, so no hacking occurred, just a simple data confusion! …
Day 004 : Vertical Rythmn and Typography
Now that we have a basic layout, with boxes for all the relevent sections, it is time to start laying in content and styling it. The main issues to consider with type are readablity, proportions and the white space between sections. Each of these plays a significant role in how text flows around a page and how information is grouped together. …
Day 003 : Digital Layout Grids
Yesterday I briefly touched upon the virtues of using the golden ratio (phi) to sub-divide squares into perfectly recursive harmonious sub-sections. Today, I hope to illustrate better what I mean with the help of some grids that I have designed specifically for web based media. The basic grid can be used anywhere from print to animation, but is tailored specifically to match the needs of current websites. …
Day 002 : Colour Scheme & Layout
So I was up late last night deciding two super inportant things : layout and colour. For layout, I am employing a fractal like golden grid, based around the fibonacci spiral. The grid starts with 1 section but is recursive in the way subsequent sections are divided. This means perfect spacing between elements regardless of where on the page they are hung, or how large they are in relation to other elements. Each grid can be rotated 90 degrees and shrunk to fit any section whilst still respecting the baseline and all global vertical guides.
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