Recently there has been a lot of press about new standards coming in across all aspects of the web. HTML5 and CSS3 offering us many new features and some not-so new ones but making them standards to which everone can adhere to (I’m taking to you Microsoft).This coupled with the recent release of Safari 4 and the future release of the Chrome OS by Google promises the hold grail that web developers and designers have been longing for. Cross-browser cross-OS rendering synchronisity. In other words: one design, one build and no cross-browser testing and no layout bug fixing. Read more…
Recently I have been taking a course provided by the W3C on mobile best practices designed to give the participant the best ways in which to design for mobile.
Topics covered are things such as graceful enhancement and graceful failure, designing specifically to allow access on various mobile browsers and adding enhancements to the site to improve user experience on the desktop browser or to allow them to fail gracefully so as still accessible on the mobile platform.
Doing this has inspired me to design a mobile specific version of my own website. Now while I would (ideally) like to create a version that is designed for all mobile platforms, I think I will start with just the iPhone.
Step one is already complete! Which is to say I have set up www.craigmdennis.com/iPhone/. Really tricky stuff… Read more…
“Yeah I’m a web designer”
That response to a question about your chosen career path used to lead people to think that you live in your parent’s basement, wore square glasses taped together, wore your trousers too high, were bad with girls and were generally a massive nerd.
Oh how times have changed (for some). As has the role of the web designer.
Web design is more than just coding a website, web design is now just a tool in a larger process. More and more is being included in the sphere of web design as the need for conversion on the web is becoming more and more important. Investment in advertising on the web recently overtook advertising on TV for the first time which means that we need to design the user experience rather than design a ‘website’.
During the process of this ‘experience design’, there are many more aspects that are involved than just a website. Read more…
I have been looking at lot recently at portfolio designs and ‘creative’ websites and wondered whether I should be trying to compete with them.
Compilations such as ‘30 Fresh and Inspirational Portfolios With A Twist’ from Smashing Magazine are fantastic as portfolio pieces and happen to be portfolios which seems to be a perfect combination. They have great work and nice looking sites but it all depends what message you want to send.
This is what I am now thinking about. What message do I want to send? Read more…
With New Designers coming up rapidly there has been much fretting about who is doing what and who is designing what. With myself and a few others being on an internship at Samsung it has proved hard to keep things consistent.
After much arguing through many emails I have decided to defer my vote to someone else as it’s getting heated. Just need someone to make a creative decision who is higher up in the hierarchy than we are.
Forgetting all of that stuff, I have redesigned my website, business card and all pdf documents and updated my ‘brand’ since doing that for the final degree exhibition. I changed the colour to 100% Magenta instead of orange but kept the same font The portfolio section is now up with proper descriptions, pictures and styling (with some more projects to come when I get a chance).
My business card can be seen below and yes I am aware that the back of the card has the wrong corners rounded in the image.
While at Samsung I noticed that my new website design did not look correct in IE6 (no surprise there then) so I spent some time correcting some CSS problems. No sooner than I had done that than I tried it in Safari and it failed even more to display correctly. Read more…
Here are a few more images showing a few more refined areas of the proposed blog design. The main blog page now has extra items on the left at an angle which will need to be images and have a image map to create links. Then there is a more detailed side bar for the photography section. With the image mapping involved in this design it means it will be even less able to translate into a Wordpress theme than the current design.
When CSS 3.0 is relseased and browsers accept the standards, I will be able to create the slanted text effect without using images and so will be able to turn it into a dynamic menu and therefore a theme. Unless I’ve changed the design again… which is more than likely!
This is a concept for a new blog design. I don’t know if I will have time to finish the concept and put it into action but after a few comments by Daniel O’Connell relating to a similar looking piece of work, I decided to prototype a few bits. I still need to show how images will look, YouTube videos, links, tags, tag cloud, blogroll, search box and comments. Also I want to tailor this to include my latest Flickr uploads (possibly in the photography section) and my twitter feed, something I didn’t do in my current theme as I didn’t know I was going to use them as much as I have.
I will keep working on it and post up a more polished picture in another post.
Here are the results, comments are welcome.
Read more…
So although I’ve been hacking away at the code of the current design of this site I realised that it wasn’t conducive to a portfolio site. So in an attempt to make myself seem more ‘designery’ I will be trying to implement the design I have concocted as shown in the screen shot. Any comments would be appreciated (Russell). The next step is to Photoshop a concept for the portfolio page.
Hello World!
This is a very apt phrase at the moment as I have been learning php and the first thing it was used for is to echo “Hello World!”. It is also appropriate as I have managed (after much tweaking) to use WordPress and my own domain to host my own blog… so to anyone who is reading this – Please see above!
Yes I’m still up!
I’ve made a new blog for the Virtual Environments project which you can check out here or click the link on the right.
I’ve also fleshed out my new website design a little more… looks like I won’t be using my newly found Java script drop-down menus.
Here’s a screen shot.
