Dolphin's Dock
Main Posts
Going Naked
No, the page you are looking at isn’t some avant garde blog template. It’s what Dolphin’s Dock looks like stripped of its external style sheet in celebration of CSS Naked Day ‘08. (Note: I’ve only stripped down the front page so if you’re reading this as an individual post, click here to see the stripped down site.)
For the non-designers out there, some explanation. In the old days (ha!), websites used to largely hold all content and styling together in one HTML file. No more, thanks to a language called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS allows (among other things) designers to separate design from content, allowing the designer to easily change from one design to another without effecting content, and allowing non-designers to update content at will. As the popularity and usage of CSS has grown, some designers have forgotten (I’m guilty of it from time to time) that the point is to separate design and content, meaning that the content should still be easily available, appropriately organized, and clearly understandable without the style sheet prettying it up.
As the Naked Day website says, “It’s time to show off your <body>.
The End of an Era
Nope, I’m not talking about the 2008 election.
It’s been at least a couple of months since I’ve had to create anything at work containing a “button” (well I’ve had a few app interfaces to design, but nothing needing a generic web button). Today, I needed one. I went through all the motions on auto-pilot and popped out a nice little button but as I reached for “Save,” I stopped dead in my tracks. There on my screen, I noticed that, without a second thought, I had just created something that looked so incredibly old-fashioned that I couldn’t CMD+Z fast enough to get it off my screen. That’s when the sad fact hit me. The “glassy” button is dead. A moment of silence, please.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d been telling my boss for a long time now that glass was going out. The trend over the last couple of years had been towards increasingly simple glass effects, and finally dropping the sharp highlight altogether for a more matte look. Still, there’s a difference between “going out” and “gone out” and it’s jarring when that which at one time reigned as the very epitome of modern “Web 2.0″ design elements finds itself in the latter categorization, and even beyond that and into the “dated” and “old-fashioned” categories.
Ignis Fatuus
Jackolantern 2007
The design should look familiar to anyone who has visited here (as opposed to reading the feed) this month. Unfortunately, I had trouble getting a decent picture of it lit, it kept blurring. I didn’t have time to pull out the tripod and take a picture that way (to avoid the blurring) because i was already running late on getting everything set up for the Halloween party, and by Sunday morning, the finer pieces (like the tree branches) were already wilting pretty badly.
Update: Well, as I said, I was unfortunately unable to get a decent lit shot this year because I didn’t have time to set up the tripod for one before the party and the heat and humidity caused this guy to wither in record time (plus I don’t know what health it was in in the first place with the drought and all. All of the pumpkins for sale seemed kinda small this year). What I did though for those who really want to see it lit is digitally “light” the above photo in photoshop. It’s below the fold check it out. And remember you can click either picture for a larger view.
Boo!
If you happened to encounter any downtime here (or weird broken layouts) lately, I apologize, but hopefully you can now see what was going on.
As you can see I’ve put together a brand new theme for Halloween! Let me know what you think and if you encounter any problems. There are a few minor problems in IE6 (and one even smaller problem in IE7), that I’m aware of but nothing that anybody will likely notice unless they are deliberately putting the site through the torture test I did when testing everything out.
Hope you have a happy Halloween!
What Were They Thinking?
Without clicking for more, can you guess what well-known product this is the new logo for?
Go ahead, guess. No? Ok, well at least take a stab at what possible industry or function this product serves.