Category: Design
Jul 92008
Brand New looks at the Hornets’ logo tweak. Scroll down to the comments section to see their secondary logo — it’s exceedingly clever, co-opts some New Orleans iconography (the primary logo dates back to the Charlotte era), and kicks the primary logo’s ass. The Saints’ fleur de lis logo represents an era when a team’s logo could be unapologetically abstract. (The bigger news is the slight color change; I’m looking forward to seeing the new uniforms.)
(0)Jan 92008
Wow — when did Pidgin get such an awesome logo? Most companies don’t have a wordmark this artful. And most open-source software projects have either a dreadful logo or none at all. (Then again, the Disney-cartoonish detail on the pigeon clashes horribly with the wordmark.)
Jun 302007
I’m going to have to compile a list of all the tiny UI touches Apple got right with the iPhone. I’ve been playing with this thing for a couple hours and I keep discovering new stuff.
(1)Jun 62007
Hixie: The CSS working group is irrelevant. I agree with everything he says — someone needs to light a fire under the CSSWG’s ass, but I don’t know who has the necessary time, inclination, and expertise.
(1)Jan 42007
Relying on software to pick colors for you is like letting your mother pick your clothes.
Oct 282006
Web design is 95% typography. So what if we have only a handful of fonts to work with? Creativity thrives under constraints. Look at Daring Fireball or Coudal Partners and observe how typography can fully define a site’s identity.
(1)Jul 72006
I know I am probably preaching to the choir here, but maybe, just maybe, if we sing loud enough, the branding firms that make these decisions will hear our song of reason and make the right decision. If we are going to redesign a classic logo (or design a new one for that matter), let’s stand up for good design and actually do something innovative instead of relying on bevels and drop shadows applied to someone else’s genius.
May 22006
Since I redesigned this blog only a couple months ago, I didn’t really take part in the CSS Reboot this year. But I did make some minor changes to the layout. Gone is the sidebar (which I was never in love with); I’ve got a new section at the bottom of each page to replace it. Also: after experimenting with sIFR many times in the past, I’ve finally taken the plunge and deployed it on this site. (I’ll continue to tweak over the next few days, so wonkiness might ensue.)
Apr 102006
At work, I’ve started to test stuff in IE7 in addition to Firefox and IE6; this has forced me to figure out how to pass certain CSS rules to all versions of IE and nothing else. (Virtually all known CSS hacks for IE have been fixed in version 7.) I know conditional comments are usually the way to go, but what if you need to override just one or two rules? Not worth the trouble of creating a separate stylesheet, in my opinion. After some hunting around just now, I realized that IE’s expression property is what I want: instead of postion: relative; one can do position: expression(’relative’);. Tell your friends!
Apr 32006
Stylable Text Fields in WebKit. Safari, which for eons has had the least-customizable form controls among major browsers, will have the most-customizable form controls when this code makes it into a release.
