WEB STANDARDS CREATIVITY

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Rob Weychert is a graphic designer, artist, writer, and thinker known for his neurotically meticulous attention to detail. Since the late 1990s, Rob has provided print and interactive graphic design solutions to clients in such disparate industries as entertainment, travel, healthcare, education, publishing, and e-commerce. When he is not absorbed in design, Rob spends most of his time scrutinizing music and film, writing haiku, screen printing, taking photos, and cruising the streets of his hometown Philadelphia on his BMX. He also writes about these topics and all things design on his personal website, www.robweychert.com.
158 A brief history of type Like all the arts, it [typography] is basically immune to progress, though it is not immune to change. Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style The art of typography has a rich and storied tradition, and like most art forms, its production processes have moved at a snail’s pace. After Gutenberg’s landmark invention of movable type (a printing method consisting of individual letters carved out of metal) in the fifteenth century, the technology of typography saw no significant change until the Industrial Revolution. The subsequent Linotype and Monotype machines and (the relatively short-lived) phototypesetting process were essentially faster, more efficient models of the same old printing method. However, the Macintosh’s introduction of type and design to the digital age in 1984 was the cultivation of a radical new method. Then, less than ten years later, just as graphic designers were becoming accustomed to digital production tools for print, a whole new medium was thrust upon them. The World Wide Web was a revolutionary means to access information, and as such, it demanded a different way of thinking about design. However, with centuries of printed tradition behind them and a relatively recent adoption of the computer, most designers had a hard time thinking in terms of anything but print, and it didn’t help that HTML was never intended to accommodate graphic design. The other half of the Web was being designed by computer enthusiasts, professional and amateur alike. They had a better understanding of the exciting potential of the Web, but little or no knowledge of visual design principles. So went the early, dark days of web design. Semantic, flexible documents looked anything but good, and goodlooking documents were anything but semantic or flexible. Straddling the turn of the century, a greater emphasis on standardized web technologies aimed to solve this problem. CSS gave designers the tools they needed to craft beautiful web pages without disrupting the underlying semantic structure of HTML. Previously unheard-of typographic control was now possible. But by this time, many designers had come of age online and were oblivious to the time-tested traditions and conventions of nuanced typographic design. Today, in the increasingly sophisticated infancy of the Web, much of its typography remains limp. This chapter aims to help put a stop to this trend, by reconciling printed typography’s rich visual tradition with web typography’s exciting dynamic capabilities. I’ll demonstrate where they may converge, where they should agree to disagree, and how just a few simple and subtle typographic techniques can breathe new life into a page. Know your text face The number one complaint designers seem to have about setting type on the Web is the small number of typefaces reliably available across platforms. While this can be frustrating, it is important to remember that selecting a typeface is only one aspect of typographic design. Some of the best typographers in the print world limit their arsenal to only a few text faces that they come to know intimately through repeated study and usage. Even if the limited choice of typefaces appropriate for the Web does offer less variety, it forces that same good practice of restraint upon us. And luckily, a number of the faces available are among the very best examples of type designed for the screen. A keen understanding of these typefaces—including their creators and historical contexts—can be a great benefit to the way we use them. Introducing Georgia If you’re skeptical that a beautiful design can be achieved using one common typeface, it is my hope that this chapter will change your mind. The vast majority of what I’ll cover will use Georgia, a serif text face commissioned from renowned type designer Matthew Carter by Microsoft in 1993. According to recent results of an ongoing code style website survey (www.codestyle.org/ css/font-family/sampler-CombinedResultsFull.shtml), Georgia is present on about 91% of Macs, 84% of PCs, and 53% of Unix systems, making it one of the most ubiquitous serif typefaces in the world. Thankfully, it is also a stellar design. Georgia is very similar to Times New Roman (Figure 7-1), one of the only serif faces with a wider distribution. Like Times New Roman, Georgia is a timeless design, embodying aesthetic and practical characteristics from a few different historical periods. However, for our purposes, Georgia trumps Times New Roman on the screen, since that’s where it was designed to be displayed.
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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
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100 Well, maybe you’re not quite
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102 This will be followed by a spec
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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 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 169 and 170: 152 Issues with the design The proj
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Page 176 and 177: The process Figure 7-1. Times New R
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Page 180 and 181: Figure 7-5. Fixed-width layout: Hor
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Page 192 and 193: All caps I am quite pleased with my
Page 194 and 195: Small caps There is one more typogr
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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
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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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