the design tag
Tingelets - Bookmarklets for Designers
Tingelets is a new, free and practical service for designers and developers. Basically it’s a set of bookmarklets that you can place in your browsers bookmark bar for immediate use. When you click on them, they highlight various elements in the current page. You can highlight tags, elements by id, elements by class and even tag sets (for example <ul> and <li> as a combination). Since they work in almost every web browser, they give you the possibility to compare web layouts on the fly.
The Tingelets are the newest project from Maurice Kühlborn and they are extremely well done. When you click on a tingelet, the corresponding element or elements are highlighted with transparent PNGs which display the name of the highlighted element.
It’s a perfect and quick solution for troubleshooting and diagnostics without having to resort to external tools like Xyle Scope.
Design News - All in One
aetherworld.org is now a proud member of Design-Feed. Design-Feed is an online aggregator site for the most interesting design related RSS feeds on the web. What sets apart Design-Feed from other aggregator sites are the hand picked feeds. This means you can get all the latest, and best, graphics and web design news in one place, rather than browsing through hundreds of sites every day. Every post aggregated is also searchable by keyword.
“Basically, it’s a one-stop shop to get all the latest web-design buzz. If you are familiar with MXNA, you can think of this as MXNA for designers”, says Felix Turner, creator of Design-Feed.
Read up on Design-Feed here.
Architectural Design
St. Petersburg, Russia’s cultural center for more than 200 years, is located on the delta of the Neva River in northwestern Russia. The majestic and impressive city center has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the whole city radiates a unique ambiance which is somewhat reminiscent of Venice. St. Petersburg’s haunting magnificence is achieved through hundreds of architectural details: decorative monuments, sculptures, vast gardens and beautiful boulevards lie alongside the Neva River with its beautiful canals and its granite embankments and over 300 bridges.
Daniel Libeskind’s conceptual design for the main building of Gazprom City.
ColorZilla now working on Intel Macs!
I’ve just received word from Alex Sirota, that his great Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Suite extension, ColorZilla, is now working on Intel Macs.
Its task is to assist professional web developers and designers with color related tasks. The feature most of us have used though, was the color picker, which unfortunately stopped working on Intel Macs.
ColorZilla allows you to get a color reading from any pixel in your web browser. You can do all sorts of things, like adjusting the sampled colors and copying them to the clipboard, but those are just two of the color related tasks ColorZilla performs.
Apply CSS to IE7 only
CSS hacks for browsers typically either exploit a flawed implementation or the complete lack of an implementation of a certain feature in the rendering engine. Most webdesigners know about the relatively poor level of web standards support in Internet Explorer and have tried for years to find workarounds for the most grievous bugs. However, exploiting software bugs to create a hack is quite dangerous because software gets updated and old flaws are fixed.
When Microsoft introduced conditional comments with Internet Explorer 5, a lot of problems were fixed. One could use constructs such as
<!--[if IE]>
<style type="text/css" media="screen">
#myID {
background-color: red;
}
</style>
<![endif]-->
to tailor CSS styles to Internet Explorer only. No other browser would parse anything in those conditional comments.
Conditional comments have a lot of drawbacks, though. Most problematically, they require changes to the actual HTML source since there is no equivalent to conditional comments in CSS. They also don’t work well with XSL as Dave Shea has pointed out. This is why most web developers turned to the less reliable technique – the exploitation of browser bugs – to target specific browsers in their stylesheets.
Adobe CSS Advisor
While the CS3 Beta was the hype of the last week and was announced with much fanfare, Adobe quietly released another product in public beta: The Adobe CSS Advisor.
The CSS Advisor is a new service that lets you easily find solutions to CSS problems and allows you to file through various lists of browser compatibility issues. It got mentioned briefly during the presentation of Dreamweaver 9/CS3 but apparently it has been released earlier and I just stumbled across the page by accident.
From the website:
- Find solutions to CSS and browser compatibility issues
- Share solutions and workarounds you’ve discovered with the community
- Comment on and improve existing solutions
At the moment it’s still quite empty but it’s a social site which allows you to post your own issues (requires you to sign up for a free Adobe ID) in a “Problem - Solution” style. And there’s even a RSS Feed for your syndication goodness.
Apparently, the Advisor will be linked with Dreamweaver 9, probably much like the sidebar help in existing Dreamweaver versions.
Web Directions North
If you haven’t previously read about Web Directions North, let me introduce you to the top-notch web development conference of 2007. Web Directions North will take place in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on February 7th and 8th 2007. There’s also an optional day with workshops on February 6th, and post conference skiing on February 9th and 10th.
This is your chance to meet all the the major webdesign stars and gurus. Put together by designers and web developers, for designers and web developers, this conference is brought to you by Dave Shea from Mezzoblue and CSS Zen Garden who is also the co-author of the brilliant book The Zen of CSS Design. The 5 day conference features speakers such as Douglas Bowman, Dan Cederholm, Molly Holzschlag, Veerle Pieters, and many more. These are the people who have inspired me dozens of times and set the course for standards-based design. Over two days and nights, Web Directions North is packed tight with talks by these renowned speakers and experts, parties, and more.
If all of this isn’t enough for you, this picture from the Blackcomb Whistler skiing area can surely change your mind. This is not only one of the worlds greatest skiing and snowboarding destinations, it’s also the home of the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Photo by Andre Charland
Don’t waste time, grab your skis or snowboard and quickly get a ticket to Web Directions North.
Redefining and Redesigning
Welcome, gentle reader, to the next iteration of the aetherworld. I’ve gone slack with my personal websites once contract based work started to eat away at my time and side projects fought over the remaining scraps. Well, here I go again. I’ve found out that for me there’s nothing better than drastic changes to get me back in line. This time, however, I’m not only relauncing but also redefining, redesigning and rebooting the aetherworld.
Redefine. Or: how things should be
First registered somewhere around 2000 (if my memory serves me right), the aetherworld has almost never had a consistant purpose. At one point it was a personal link collection, then a place to try out various CSS layouts, a listing for my music collection, a place where I blogged about design and tech stuff and for the past year, it was dead. Literally.
The first logical step for me is redefining, what the aetherworld should become. I decided to turn it into a blog again, forcing me to concentrate more on content than on presentation. I want it to be a place to share my web design and web development work as well as personal thoughts on various topics.
Old aetherworld layouts
Redesign. Or: how things should look
Whenever I have a blank paper in front of me, something inside of me wants to draw, to design, to make the paper become something beautiful, something with a purpose and something pleasant to look at. A blank paper and a pencil is my greatest incentive for starting to work on a project.
The same goes for a blank website. I could have chosen to design the site in private, work on the layout till it’s perfect, and only then make the finished version go live. I chose not to. A blank and unstyled website is as much incentive to get me working as a blank paper. Every time i see the naked aetherworld, I’ll want to style it, make it better, make it look beautiful. That will be my way to give myself a kick in the ass.
Bandwagon
I thought my live design was a unique idea. That’s why I was really shocked when I saw other people doing the same. Well, so there goes novelty.
Anyway, the design process will be completely live and will take place over a longish period of time. I’m planning to be finished before January 1st though. So bear with me as I’m adding content and layout and expect things to break from time to time.
