WEB STANDARDS CREATIVITY

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Mark Boulton is a typographic designer from Cardiff, UK. He has worked as an art director for design agencies in Sydney, London, and Manchester, serving clients such as the BBC, T-Mobile, and British Airways. For four years, Mark worked as a senior designer for the BBC, designing websites and web applications, before leaving to set up his own design consultancy, Mark Boulton Design. He is an active member of the International Society of Typographic Designers and writes a design journal at www.markboulton.co.uk.
132 What is a grid system? A grid system is a framework. It’s a system used to create compositions. Everywhere you look, you see grid systems: city blocks, magazines, newspapers, building elevations. It’s because we humans like to organize things, and, in many western cultures, we understand them when they are organized into straight lines. We know what to look at next, what to push or click next, and what to do next because of grid systems. Grid systems aren’t just functional though; they can be beautiful. A grid system can be designed using the Golden Section, a ratio that has been linked to aesthetic beauty for centuries. If something is perceived as beautiful, then according to the Aesthetic Usability Effect, it is more usable as well. For more on the Golden Section, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_section. Grid systems are incredibly important in the design process. Along with typography, they determine the visual organization of information. In this chapter, I’m going to show you how I designed a simple grid system for a recent project. Before I launch into that though, I feel it’s important to give a brief overview of grid system design—how and where grid systems came into being, and the changes they’ve gone through over the decades. Through the ages No one really knows where grid systems originated. Some would argue they’ve been around ever since man started producing art. Others would say they started when man developed written language. However, I think they started when designers consciously began developing them to solve compositional problems. This, I believe, began with Villard’s diagram, which was in use since at least medieval times. Prior to World War II, grid systems were very formulaic, straightforward affairs—rectangular structures built around the proportions of devices such as Villard’s diagram. They were often limited by the technology that produced them, and involved columns of text occasionally punctuated by an image. Grid systems of that era rarely used whitespace as a design device, let alone more than one typeface. That was until a few notable designers came along, including Josef Müller-Brockmann, who challenged the design conventions of the time. They proposed a new system: a more flexible grid with more tools at the designer’s disposal, called the modular grid. The importance of these designers’ thinking shouldn’t be underestimated. Much of what we understand as modern typography and grid system design came from them. Evidence of their work can be seen permeating graphic design of everything from magazine design (see Figure 6-1) to websites (see Figure 6-2).
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CAMERON ADAMS ~ MARK BOULTON ~ ANDY
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Web Standards Creativity: Innovatio
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Contents About the Technical Review
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PART 2: EFFECTIVE PRINT TECHNIQUES
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About the Technical Reviewer Molly
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Mark Boulton I’d like to thank Kh
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Getting Creative with Web Standards
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Figure 5. The Zen Garden is still g
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Layout Magic Welcome to Part 1 of o
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Before starting Erskine Design in 2
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6 Figure 1-2. The completed Dirty P
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Dirty pretty presentation When buil
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Background Next, we apply the main
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Finally, the main content selector
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The markup is as follows. Note that
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Unless you study the end result clo
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Tables Descendant selectors are ess
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These very simple rules, and the fa
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Conclusion Of course, building the
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Dan Rubin spends his days blending
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Figure 2-1. On the left, the origin
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The CMS challenge It doesn’t take
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The next step was spending some tim
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Videos Photos Extras Links Forum St
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Ever find yourself getting lost in
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z-index:100; left:29px; top:39px; m
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By looking at the markup generated
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Creating the illusion of vertical t
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The first argument defines the CSS
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Figure 2-9. Before (right) and afte
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Such a #teaser After styling the #t
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When time is of the essence, hacks
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Ethan Marcotte has been designing a
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Getting started The article templat
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Structuring the CSS Looking above t
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Adding a layer of style OK, enough
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A quick preview of our code at this
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For our narrow, 190-pixel-wide righ
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Strictly speaking, these class name
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Our column’s “background” wil
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Figure 3-14. The exact same templat
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Figure 3-17. The anatomy of our nar
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So there we have it: a single class
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Figure 3-21. The text size can be i
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anchor.setAttribute("href", "javasc
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78 4 Designing for Outside the Box
Page 97 and 98: 80 Worries? “Oh baby, what’s th
Page 99 and 100: 82 Stop worrying, start with markup
Page 101 and 102: 84 A third-level heading proudly an
Page 103 and 104: 86 Adding divisions from the conten
Page 105 and 106: 88 With the elements and appropriat
Page 107 and 108: 90 Styling WorrySome.net Whereas ma
Page 109 and 110: 92 Take a peek at how your design i
Page 111 and 112: 94 The final result of your column-
Page 113 and 114: 96 Each of the paragraphs of introd
Page 115 and 116: 98 While floats and image replaceme
Page 117 and 118: 100 Well, maybe you’re not quite
Page 119 and 120: 102 This will be followed by a spec
Page 121 and 122: 104 The result of this is that your
Page 123 and 124: 106 We'll give you another look at
Page 125 and 126: 108 5 Creative Use of PNG Transpare
Page 127 and 128: 110 PNG, GIF, and JPEG The PNG imag
Page 129 and 130: 112 The image that needs to work on
Page 131 and 132: 114 Wilson includes his transparent
Page 133 and 134: 116 Now I’ll create a 1-by-1-pixe
Page 135 and 136: 118 In another creative example, de
Page 137 and 138: 120 A bit of CSS is then used t
Page 139 and 140: 122 And then the CSS: a.photo-conta
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Page 143 and 144: 126 However, I’ve reversed their
Page 145 and 146: 128 var div = document.createElemen
Page 147: 130 6 Grid Design for the Web mark
Page 151 and 152: 134 Ratios and the canvas Ratios ar
Page 153 and 154: 136 Beginning with the pen I like t
Page 155 and 156: 138 Designing the columns The wiref
Page 157 and 158: 140 This makes 1em roughly 10px (16
Page 159 and 160: 142 The masthead includes several i
Page 161 and 162: 144 Building the CSS I’m at the s
Page 163 and 164: 146 Setting the width of the column
Page 165 and 166: 148 Figure 6-16 shows the masthead
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Page 169 and 170: 152 Issues with the design The proj
Page 171: 154 Figure 6-20. The new WRC shares
Page 174 and 175: Rob Weychert is a graphic designer,
Page 176 and 177: The process Figure 7-1. Times New R
Page 178 and 179: Here is a simplified version of the
Page 180 and 181: Figure 7-5. Fixed-width layout: Hor
Page 182 and 183: Translation Figure 7-9. Final layou
Page 184 and 185: With just three short paragraphs to
Page 186 and 187: Figure 7-12. A cohesive text block
Page 188 and 189: As another elegant piece of insuran
Page 190 and 191: Image replacement But I’m still n
Page 192 and 193: All caps I am quite pleased with my
Page 194 and 195: Small caps There is one more typogr
Page 196 and 197: Figure 7-24. The effort was all wor
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DOM Scripting Gems What book on web
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Ian Lloyd runs Accessify.com, a sit
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Preparing the foundations With a cl
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Identifying the sections The basic
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The addEvent function primes the we
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That’s our AddEvent part, mention
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for (i=0;i
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It is generally considered bad prac
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hide the sections from printout el[
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The following is the code required
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Sliding in the code In the proof-of
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For the purposes of building on the
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Never mind all that—what about sa
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208 9 Creating Dynamic Interfaces U
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210 Different layouts for different
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212 Figure 9-1. The UX Magazine web
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214 Figure 9-3. The White Pages web
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216 Browser size, not resolution Al
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218 There are two major changes bet
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220 return document.documentElement
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222 } else if (typeof target.attach
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224 Figure 9-7 shows the default vi
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226 The markup The high-level struc
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228 if (typeof event.stopPropagatio
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230 Styling with CSS Now that we’
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232 event = window.event; } if (typ
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234 function getPosition(theElement
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236 document.getElementsByTagName("
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238 ghostMarker.marked.appendChild(
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240 Keeping track of changes The te
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10 242 Accessible Sliding Navigatio
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244 The killer feature Admit it. Yo
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246 Accessibility and JavaScript Fo
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248 After the main link is clicked,
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250 Switching between CSS states wi
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252 Adding sliding behaviors Now th
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254 // set the height to a new valu
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256 When using a screen magnifier,
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258 If the user does repeat the “
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260 There may be unforeseen consequ
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262 Croft, Jeff, 109 CSS (Cascading
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264 max-width, 58, 71 @media print,
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266 websites A List Apart, 134 New
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WEB STANDARDS CREATIVITY

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