More reading and going live

Going live

The big day. A few minutes ago I decided to write this documentation. To show others how I work on this, to keep myself on track showing me that there is progress despite the the lack of results, and last but not least to review this later on and make it better next time.

More reading

I’ve read a hell lot of articles recently and I found something to pick up in every single one. I realized that the perfect solution I am craving for won’t be possible to do. Just today it happened that I got into a lot of articles about two opposing aspects of web design: The macro-like theme of general information architecture side-by-side with the more micro-like aspect of typography. Funny enough those two give quite straight directions, and I am glad about that, since most things turned out to need to be looked into way further.

It’s interesting that most people seem to be on track with the theoretical approach: Typography is the major part of web content design, usability is the most important aspect when designing the interface, web design needs to be cleaned of unnecessary gutter (in ways of content, design and markup), the content istelf should be the most important part of a website and that none of those parts can really work separated from the others.

On the other hand there’s a lot of different approaches when it comes to practice, on how to accomplish those rules. Funny enough it turns out that there’s a lot of experts out there, doing one thing perfectly right and stick to it by all means, yet miserable fail on other requirements and therefore end up with nothing but a big mess. Tough luck.

Questions

So lately I spent most of the time on comparing methods to achieve various things (uhm … what a sentence). For example:

• Should a baseline grid rely on pixel-sized type?
  No good: Some browsers still don’t resize those.
  Good: Makes things a lot easier (mathematics can get tricky with relative units, and there’s no guarantee on how browsers handle things like 0.0625em).
• Should the layout width also be flexible?
  No good: Can get kind of complicated, again we rely on mathematics and relative units. Also there’s the thing with images – how to handle those when the layout can be resized at all?
  Good: If the layout looks good on a small screen, users with a bigger one can adjust the whole thing to their needs – what a nice feature! Also the line-width usually is (or should be) a cleverly planned thing. And if resizing doesn’t resize everything, these typographical things would break and make for a less readable layout.
• Only use safe fonts?
  No good: It’s been a few years that we sticked to Tahoma and Verdana. It’s the 21st century, we really should be able to move on and spice up that boring web-surface a little.
  Good: It’s safe. And easier. If I based my layout on a non-safe font I’d also have to test the substitutes, to at least keep them as good-looking as possible.
• Use a “web-grid” or a “design-grid”?
  Web-grid: The usual stuff – x columns, y pixels each,
  z pixels gutter, somewhat meeting the font requirements.
  Design-grid: Use proportions, directly relate grids to type (therefore make the grid resizeable), try to bring more of the print-typography to the web, pleasing the bored eyes of the casual surfer
• Use images inline or separate them?
  Inline: Pictures will most likely vary in size. Placing them inline will make it kind of difficult to get them to comfort the grid. It will most likely require some server-side action, what breaks the separation-rules

And a lot more questions that are floating around in my head at the moment, waiting to be answered. I really have to set up a briefing to use as a guideline, or I’ll find myself thinking Uhm … how did I decide about that?. Time for decisions.