For those wishing to learn a new skill or revise their learning, Westciv is commencing their excellent free basic lessons in HTML and CSS. A new lesson is released every week.
Graphic Design Bugbears
There’s a very funny and applicable list of gripes which will be familiar to most graphic designers at Adland.
My favourites are
15. If three designs are shown to a client, your least favorite will be chosen or any combination of worst components of each.
16. If two designs are shown, a third will be requested. If provided, then one of the first two will be chosen.
And there’s more notes about bad design projects at Andy Budd’s blog.
Maleny Manor wins
Again, Maleny Manor has excelled in the ABIA awards, taking out the Golden awards for 2005 for both ceremony and reception venue. This top wedding venue was also finalist for Best Function Co-ordinator. Congratulations to Marlene and Simon!
Accessibility Survey
Results of the ENABLED survey on web developer usage and knowledge of designing sites accessible for the disabled are now available.
58% of respondents were not aware of the Web Accessibility Initiative, and only 36% attempt to make their sites accessible. I’m not surprised, because to do so requires gaining knowledge and skills way above the use of a WSIWG program.
National Library Archive
Country and gospel singer Paul McCloud’s site has been chosen for archiving in the Australian National Library Archive.
More awards
Two new prestigious accolades have been awarded to the Sibagraphics site … Tim’s Spider Merit Award and Invision-Graphics 2005-2006 Award. View these and others in the Sibagraphics awards section.
Styled Scroll Bars
Although IE only styled scroll bars can look ‘pretty’, I’ve lost patience with them because they are a proprietary, non-web standard addition which needs to be dodged round to ensure W3C CSS validation. And since IE only has 87% or thereabouts of the browser market these days and coloured scroll bars only work in DTD Quirks mode … why bother.
Here’s how I include them when desired, in a way that permits validation. Firstly, use a free visual scroll bar styling program like this online tool or this one and obtain the scroll bar css. Then convert it to javascript (HTML Kit has a nifty plugin that does it with a click of a button), save it with a .js file extension and link it in the head of your markup document/s.
<script language="JavaScript" xsrc="js/css.js" mce_src="js/css.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
Font sources
Collecting fonts is one of my passions. I was most pleased to stumble across Fontleech, a blog devoted to fonts. The site continuously alerts its readers to and catalogues a range of free font sources I haven’t discovered before as well as some beloved old ones, including the archives of the prolific and luminal font designer Manfred Klein.
Web design and SEO
At 45 Berea Street, I found a well-written article which summarises important points for effective search engine optimisation which Sibagraphics already employs in its site design. The article emphasises the need to implement search engine strategies from the ground up … through site structure, valid coding, useful metatags and page content.
Font sizing
As well as through the font checking utilities on this site, the perennial problem of font sizing methods acceptable for all browsers is discussed by Owen Briggs at his site. He supplies some handy cross-browser comparison screen shots.
Owen leans towards using percentages due to their compatability. I’ve recently started setting html {font-size:100%} then body {font-size:90%} and em units throughout the rest of the style sheet. Wondering whether it may be best to go back to using percentages only as it doesn’t seem to make much difference as long as the base font is set at 100%.