The nice people at WebAssist.com are letting me try out their new CSS Menu Writer extension for Dreamweaver. I got a demonstration of it yesterday, and I’ve been putting it though it’s paces this morning. It is exactly what the title would suggest, a CSS menu writer. Working through four tabbed menus, you can easily create [...]
Graphic Design: The art and profession of selecting and arranging visual elements-such as typography, images, symbols, and colours-to convey a message to an audience. - Encyclopædia Britannica
I think that that may be just the beginning of what Graphic Design is, but it's as good a place to start as any. Graphic Design is to me a blending of Art and Communication. Creating an elegant and interesting framework with which to present information.
As a Graphic Designer I have to be both an artist who can visualize a design, and a technician who can bring that design to life. It is an odd combination of artistic inspiration and technical know-how, a graphical jack-of-all-trades.
This site is my online sketch book. A place to try new ideas, collect resources for my work, and write about design. As I have time I'll be adding the Resources and Qualifications sections as well as writing in Thoughts on Design.
My most recent writing includes:
CSS Menu Writer
IE6 bugs, defined
IE 6 actually had the best CSS support of any browser when it first came out… SEVEN YEARS AGO. - CSS-Tricks Chris Coyier at CSS Tricks has written a very nice piece on IE6 CSS bugs. Anyone who’s dealt with these will appreciate this list. Anyone who’s fought with them and didn’t know what they were [...]
How is your Shop Window?
Attitude Design has an interesting take on Home Pages and Shop Windows. Retail shop windows carry massive lessons for home page designers. Take a high street fashion shop for example. The shop window will typically contain the following - the logo of the shop, some attractive graphics, some plastic models displaying a wide range of garments [...]
Keeping up with Design
Somebody asked me a good question today. To paraphrase, it was “what websites do you use to keep up with what’s going on in the industry?”. Here’s the list: While I don’t write about blogging, I do follow what’s going on with that industry. It’s too much of a factor in the web design business not [...]
IE8 to display like IE8
Despite early announcements that IE8 would default to displaying pages as if it were IE7, Microsoft is now announcing that it will default to Standards mode. This will alleviate the need for designers to opt out, by opting in as I’ve written about before. Microsoft Expands Support for Web Standards Consistent with its efforts to promote further [...]