WEB STANDARDS CREATIVITY

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And now to the typography. At this stage, I remove the grid image from my background declaration on the body tag. I don’t need it now that I know everything aligns correctly. Finally, I add some margins to the elements in the columns to create some horizontal alignment. chapter 6 Grid Design for the Web 151
152 Issues with the design The project presented many challenges. It was a redesign, so there was legacy content, a history in terms of brand, and a certain level of user expectation that comes with all redesigns. These all had to be considered. The CSS was a particular challenge. Not for the reason you may expect, though. You thought I was going to say Internet Explorer browser problems, right? Aha! Well, no, that wasn’t the problem. I was lucky, as a designer, to be working for a dream client who basically said, “Oh, ignore browsers that aren’t standardscompliant.” Of course, I asked if they were sure. At first, I couldn’t quite understand why, but I quickly realized it was because we were dealing with a pretty much locked-down audience in terms of recommended and supported software. Within the IBO, Firefox is actually the recommended browser. Of course, Internet Explorer is still a majority browser for the IBO’s audience, but I developed the design with Firefox as the primary browser to ensure the code was as standardscompliant as possible. I turned my attention to Internet Explorer 6 afterwards, adding workarounds to ensure it worked in that browser, too. It was nice that the target browsers allowed me to keep hacks to a minimum. As I was saying, the challenging thing with this project was how to manage the CSS. The customization options for this site were plentiful. All of these options would be saved into a user profile, which meant the system had to remember what font size, layout, and so on the user had saved. The brief stipulated the user had to be able to change the layout (fixed or flexible) and the type size. Also, there was a zoom layout for the visually impaired. In addition to that, the two sites, the OCC and the WRC, both had to share common elements such as grid and typography; the only difference was color. It was a complex problem if all this was to be addressed using different style sheets. Overcoming these issues wasn’t particularly easy, but was helped enormously by the project process that was undertaken by the IBO and myself. There were specs, wireframes, use cases, and concepts—all the sort of documentation you would expect in a project of this size. However, the process was small and intimate with the client. There was iteration after iteration. Solving problems together, I’d say, was the real success of this project. Conclusion I didn’t deal with CSS hacks in this chapter. Why? Well, I think they are out of scope here, and could confuse the explanation of constructing the grid. You can add hacks in if your design requires it. There is further hack coverage throughout this book, and CSS Mastery (friends of ED, ISBN: 1-59059-614-5) contains comprehensive information on hacks. What I have created here is a simple grid system, not just columns. To the casual observer, this is nothing more than a three-column layout using standard 250px wide columns. However, I carefully constructed the grid, considering all of the compositional options available to me using this six-column grid system. This allowed for a wide variety of layout options that, importantly, relate to each other. For posterity’s sake, and to give you an idea of how radically different the new design is, I’ve included a few screenshots to show the before and after states. Figures 6-18 and 6-19 show the OCC site, and Figure 6-20 shows the WRC site. I’m sure you’ll agree, the new site stands head and shoulders above the old.
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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
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80 Worries? “Oh baby, what’s th
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82 Stop worrying, start with markup
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84 A third-level heading proudly an
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86 Adding divisions from the conten
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88 With the elements and appropriat
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90 Styling WorrySome.net Whereas ma
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92 Take a peek at how your design i
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94 The final result of your column-
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96 Each of the paragraphs of introd
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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
Page 141 and 142: 124 I’ve specified #cc0000
Page 143 and 144: 126 However, I’ve reversed their
Page 145 and 146: 128 var div = document.createElemen
Page 147 and 148: 130 6 Grid Design for the Web mark
Page 149 and 150: 132 What is a grid system? A grid s
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 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
Page 198 and 199: DOM Scripting Gems What book on web
Page 200 and 201: Ian Lloyd runs Accessify.com, a sit
Page 202 and 203: Preparing the foundations With a cl
Page 204 and 205: Identifying the sections The basic
Page 206 and 207: The addEvent function primes the we
Page 208 and 209: That’s our AddEvent part, mention
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Page 212 and 213: It is generally considered bad prac
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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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