Flashback to the 1990s

2 Sep 2020

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To my surprise, I have discovered that the website for the movie Space Jam (1996) is still up and running.

Somebody at Warner Brothers has decided to keep the site preserved in its original state for the past twenty-odd years. And I can only thank them from the very bottom of my heart.

This website is the very pinnacle of 1990s web design. And it is amazing.

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CSS is a messy mess

28 Nov 2012

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CSS is supposed to make my life easier (and it has) but it’s still a broken counter-intuitive very messy mess. It does not solve all problems, and for the past few days (on and off) I have been going round the bend trying to build a comparatively simple HTML / CSS layout.

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Admin Themes

25 Oct 2010

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There are a thousand sites out there which offer free (or almost free) wordpress themes; many of which look very very similar.

But earlier this year, I found www.themeforest.net which offered, not only the ubiquitous wordpress themes, but themes (or templates or skins or layouts, call-them-what-you-will) for admin pages and content management systems.

Why haven’t I come across this before?  I spend so much time building back-end control panel and sometimes I really feel that I should add a sticker which says “No Designers were harmed in the making of this product”  Will definitely be using some of these in the future.

Here’s an example showing Cleanity

Preview of Cleanity Theme

Who needs web design?

5 Jun 2007


I loved this – www.noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com Breaks soooo many rules about web design and accessibility blah-blah-blah, but I loved it. Essentially an online ad, but such a witty one.

Lorem Ipsum Garbage

22 Mar 2007


Sometimes you read something and just go “Yes!” to it. The following articulated perfectly my grudge against Lorem Ipsum filler text – basically no one wants to read this garbage so it ends up at 8px white text on a black background.

By not having the imagination to imagine what the content “might” be, a design consideration is lost. Meaning becomes obfuscated because “it’s just text”, understandability gets compromised because nobody realized that this text stuff was actually meant to be read. Opportunities get lost because the lorem ipsum garbage that you used instead of real content didn’t suggest opportunities. The text then gets made really small, because, it’s not meant to be used, we might as well create loads of that lovely white space.

From I hate Lorem Ipsum and Lorem Ipsum Users by Tom Smith

And I found Tom Smith’s blog entry via Getting Real by 37Signals; a collection of essays where I find myself saying “Yes!” a lot!

Time breakdown of modern web design

17 Jan 2007


piechart

It’s scary how accurate this is. For me, I’d want to drop the slice “Time spent actually designing anything” and replace it with “Time spent explaining the realities of html and css to distressed designer”

Weblog Style

2 Sep 2006

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Well overdue – but I’ve finally reworked the wordpress templates so this weblog has the same style and layout as the rest of my site. It hasn’t taken that long, an evening, but there are so many other things on the to-do list which take precedence, especially if they are for other people.

The site design is by Kuldeep Salhan, not me. Design is something I’d far rather pass on to someone else – I have no visual flair and don’t enjoy faking it.