Crazy year so far…
I’ve had a crazy year already. I’ve reduced my course load and downloaded a neat little program Wunderkit to help me get more organized. You should check out Wunderkit if you are on a Mac or go to wunderkit.com to use the web version. I love the collaboration tools and will be using it to plan and work with colleges via the web.
Please leave a comment about your experiences with Wunderkit if you have used it.
Related articles
- Wunderkit Finally Hits the Mac (mac.appstorm.net)
CMS Research Poll
I’d like to know what CMS solutions my readers actually use. I’ve been looking at open-source solutions like Joomla and WordPress mostly but I know that there are a lot more out there. Feel free to add CMS solutions to the poll if you don’t see the one you use and please comment on this post as to why you like to use it. Thanks!
Screen Typography
Website: coding.smashingmagazine.com/2012/01/30/the-future-of-screen-typography-is-in-your-hands/
The first time I read a document on a computer screen, that was traditionally presented only in printed form, I knew two things. First, digital documents make a lot of sense for storage, presentation, portability and environmental reasons. Second, we weren’t ready for any intensive reading tasks onscreen because the resolution wasn’t high enough yet and backlighting creates eyestrain over time.
With a little bit of time, e-ink helped come to the rescue for eye-strain and display technology made some leaps and bounds becoming both less expensive and higher resolution. This was both good and bad as I see it. For the first time, it was possible to consume a lengthy article, book or magazine onscreen with less eye strain, but it also revealed to us type snobs that what we had was crappy typography and the tools we had didn’t help matters. We have a few emerging tools that look promising, but they are just band-aids in my opinion.
In this article posted to SmashingMagazine.com last week by Andreas Carlsson & Jaan Orvet, some clever Javascript is employed to search out and replace characters with the proper ligatures and create markup in the code for superscript type and many other tasks. Since type on the web flows within many different browser windows it needs something to guide the typographic choices for each situation. I call this a band-aid approach because sooner or later I see this becoming part of CSS or whatever the next web standard is. For now, this is what we have, and if we want more we need to push developers for more tools and push web standards organizations for adoption of those tools.
Related articles
- The Future Of Screen Typography Is In Your Hands (coding.smashingmagazine.com)
New Year, New Things to Learn
I have finished a portfolio website and as soon as finances catch up with my pace I will have it hosted with a .com address of my own. Next up, learn Javascript and PHP. Classes start again on Tuesday. I will be taking a more advanced web design course and a class where we design for a local micro-business. This should be fun.
Update
I recently finished classes and threw off the yoke of social networks so I can catch up on life events. Unfortunately I have not been updating the blog as I had hoped, but I did finish a portfolio website for my web design class. I will be updating it and adding new feature before its official launch. Next step is a custom .com address and finding a web service that will let me do some interesting things and not cost too much. Thinking about doing something with my Cargo account.
Gonna eat my breakfast burrito and finish running errands.
Legacy Browser Support
Image via Wikipedia
I’ve been doing some self-guided study on CSS and one topic keeps coming back to the forefront. If I am going to be a professional web designer, I need to make websites that are compatible with all browsers old and new. Internet Explorer appears to be the worst offender as far as supporting the design standards so designers often need to write extra lines of code specifically for IE to help it along. Why, oh why do we do this? The most common argument is that not everyone has a choice in the browser they use (ie. at work) or they don’t know how to update it. To this I say, “Forget them! They are dinosaurs that need to evolve or go extinct.” This may sound harsh but if we keep catering to them as designers, they will have no reason to update their browser or seek help to update it. These are the people who are holding back innovation and the evolution of web design.
One solution to the problem is browsers that automatically update for the user instead of relying on the user to manually update it. Microsoft has implemented a solution for automatic updates since at least Windows XP, however people who had slow connections, slow computers or pirated copies of the OS would choose not to turn on auto-update. This amounted to a large number of people who I had to help update their system, which makes me wonder how many people really used the auto-update feature. Apple has a similar system but it is better integrated and more user-friendly for those that don’t understand the underpinnings of the OS, at least in comparison to Windows XP. Full disclosure, I made the switch to Apple products during the Windows Vista fiasco so I don’t know Vista or 7 very well. Perhaps one of my readers can fill me in on how well updates are handled in the newer versions of Windows? One thing is for certain, no matter what your OS preference is, your browser should be updating automagically as updates come out so we can reduce the workload on web designers and the amount of data (extra lines of code) that is sent with every click of a link.
