So far there is a dancing robot who has a TV for a belly, a shifty looking ninja and a pig with a jetpack. I’m just playing for now

In this way, the entire site remains pretty similar, with only a few changes that happen on link clicking. To accomplish this, I am using the incredible jQuery Javascript library to make asynchronous calls to load pages into sections, and also to display and control the flash applet with a series of animation and data commands.

The most challenging aspects of designing for such sites lie in how using Javascript removes a lot of the controls that we take for granted – a good example here would be that using Javascript to load in a new page breaks the BACK button in your browser. Which, for most users, is completely unacceptable. Other problems such as incorrect permalinks for bookmarking and placing history items in your list are difficult to remedy, although with cunning use of hidden forms and some Javascript parsing functions for extrapolating Urls and creating permalinks, it is possible.

The site now handles itself cross-browser and deals with all of these issues, as well as scrolling to anchored links and handling bookmarks.

If you find that this site is causing you problems, or that it is not working as I described, please leave a comment along with your machine details and browser specifications. Thanks!

Tested on : Firefox 2+ / IE 6+ / Safari 2+ / Opera 7+ / Konqueror 2+ / Chrome
Machines : Windows XP / Windows 2000 / Windows Vista / Mac OSX Leopard / Linux Kubuntu / Linux Fedora

Know Issues : Konqueror disables the flash applets ability to comminicate with Javascript (See error message in flash) – this is completely outside of my control and seems to depend on how your system is configured. This won’t prevent you from enjoying the site, just won’t let you see alot of the animations!

Certain sections are much more important than others with this site, and depending on why you are here, you will have different interests and want to see specific relevent and pertinent data to your needs. On the whole, most people are here to look at my portfolio and the things that I do – and so communicating this is my most important responsibiliy. As the portfolio itself has so many varied categories, it would be best to show on the front page only the most interesting and largest  sections – such as web and graphics – so that people have a quick access point to what they want.To get to the heart of how I want to promote the content, it is important to understand what people want to look at – and how that affects their next move around the site.

Certain sections are obviously essential – such as Contact and About – these communicate rudimentary information that has to be available site wide. For contact we have the choice of showing a contact page, or even just contact details in the footer. Same with About -it would be best to show some about information all the time – prefereably with a link to more information, best served with it’s own page.

So for added security, I have added some extra .htaccess rules and chmodded any weak folders, updated my password to a crazy length, altered a few MySQL parameters and disabled all FTP users except two. I don’t seem to be paranoid enough these days!

I have very personal preferences when it comes to typography, and for this site I want to focus on readability, rather than aesthetics. I like big fonts, with big gaps between words and lots of space between lines – making it very easy to read, and incredibly easy to skim read. This is an important quality as many people will stumble onto this site needing to be made instantly familiar with the context. For important words, and to highlight significant sentences there are a number of extra CSS classes to handle fancy formatting.

An important part of any site is how it moves your user’s eyes around the page, and in particular how the vertical spacing between headings,  paragraphs and other elements maintains a rhythmn that balances and spaces out all of the information. To develop, demonstrate and code the typography I have created a special test page which contains all the headings, paragraphs and special class codes that need to be styled for the content on this site. In the background you can see the vertical rythmn shown as equally spaced horizontal stripes, or ‘baselines’.

This is the vertical drumbeat for our content. All headings, paragraphs, images and charts have to be able to sit perfectly either on these lines or use margins to offset themselves asymnetrically between (like an offbeat). This beat runs through all sections of the site and never changes.

For designerZen, I am using an 18px baseline. This was derived from playing around with the basic 12pt font (that is used for most of the site content) and changing the leading until a long paragraph was easily readable, and short paragraphs were clear. 18px with a 12px base font means 12 pixels vertically of text, then 6 pixels of space below.

Check out this page for the test.

For all fonts smaller than 18px, it is important to add line-height so that their baseline extend to the full 18px. For fonts larger than 18px, it is important to set it so that the entire hieght of the font plus line-height is a direct multiple of 18px and also the margins above and below them. Take a look at the typography.css for more information.

There are many resources to help you build to a baseline, my favourite debugging tool is syncotype, which overlays a grid of horizontal lines spaced along a baseline that you can specify. Try it out for yourself on the test page!

I have written a piece about the elegance of Phi here and how it can be derived mathematically.

Main Colour Palette

The soft brown makes for an extremely easy on the eye text colour, and the blues lend themselves to links with hover classes.

The interesting thing is going to be where to use the accent greens and how to display the extra blue so that it ties the style together. This palette is quite bold, and without making the entire site dark, I have decided to partition the colours into sections with only one colour repeating everywhere.

What is nice about this colour scheme is that there are alternative combinations of colours that can be used that complement each other but look radically different when used side by side with other combinations. Take for example green and brown next to green and navy – these contrast very strongly and so could be useful to draw fences between sections.

These five colours will be used all over, but for backgrounds there needs to be some shades of neutral tone. White is an obvious choice, but as a lot of my art uses white as the highlight colour, the works will not be as vibrant if placed on sheer white. Thanks to new CSS specifications we can utilise opacity to help blend these tones together with the white content sections.

Also, as the site is already becoming overcrowded with navigation – most of which is secondary – we need a non distracting colour for hiding these away.

As promised, I am going to keep all my processes documented in this blog. The basic premise for the new site in my head is a strongly character based style with part animated, part static, all fun content! Starting out with a fresh sketch book and a head of ideas, I have already made some decisions way before starting anything about certain design restrictions that I am self imposing.

Firstly, I am designing for 960px screen width – that is 960 pixels maximum width – with a permanently visible section of 800px.

Secondly, for proportional prosperity, I will be using the classic 16 : 9 ratio for balancing whitespace.

Thirdly, and as ever, all guides, sections and margins are based on the golden section and Phi – this allows harmonious  subsections to fit anywhere on the site.

From these restrictions, it’s time to get the pen to paper