Ever feel you just need a bit of harmony in your day, a few moments of clarity and calm? Find yourself battling with noise? Now you can relax online with the 3D Buddha Machine! Load it up and click until happy… if you feel it is too loud, scroll the mouse wheel. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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! Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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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Mix your favourite music blogs with your social bookmarks, add streaming radio and folksonomy… integrate with new music web services plus the latest web trends and what do you get…? Continue reading
A fascinating hybrid of electro J-Pop and classical cello, the Stereo Art project is still in its early phase, but thanks to many live performances, the word is spreading!
