Siolon

Every once in a while I see a quote on something that nails it. Jon Tangerine wrote recently on The Paragraph in Web Typography & Design, and he said a quote worth sharing and contemplating on. The only thing I did was fix two spelling errors. “Good typography makes the canvas fit the meaning of the text, not the other way around. It paints pictures with form that enrich the meaning of the words with colour, texture and movement. It is illusive, subtle, and ambient. It’s the shirt that engages from a distance. The closer you get to it (read more...)

A trendy topic amongst CSS’ers is the CSS reset. The idea is that you intercept the default browser stylesheet (that is used first in the cascade), reset, and then apply generic styles including margin/padding. I read many articles by many gurus, but I eventually came out with what I have below. For differing implementations check out this great “killer collection” of resets, and note that this won’t work in IE6 due to the universal selector but I’m ok with that. EDIT: My syntax highlighting plugin added “baseline” in there twice, and it shouldn’t be there. If you view it (read more...)

Usability testing is often overlooked to the peril of both the developer and the consumer. I was convicted reading Steve Krug’s book on usability to go ahead with testing even if it’s small and cheap. In doing this for the recent design of this site I wanted to share how I did usability testing for all of $60. Feedback Form The first thing I did was create a form in Wufoo, a powerful form building application, to receive feedback. I made it simple and short (I had to keep it to 10 fields in the free version). (read more...)

I gave the following presentation at my day job, and I thought others might benefit. That, and I think that SlideShare is a cool app! | View | Upload your own (read more...)

Wait, aren’t all WordPress users writers? Well, not exactly. A lot of people use the WordPress platform to talk about their pets, family, or odd Star Trek fetish (which is fine); but there are users of WordPress who subject themselves the rigors of professional writing. This post really is for those wanting to improve their blog’s typography. When I started my first blog I found that the more serious I took it and the more involved my posts got that I needed more functionality. I wanted my blog to look and act less like a blog (read more...)