I kept myself busy with some webdesign again the last few days as my book chapter is reviewed by the technical editor and I had some promises to fulfil. So take a peek at two new web site designs:

Pop-Portraits.com

Pop-Portraits is the hobby and artistic outlet of Stephen Wickstead, a designer I am working with at my employers. What he does is nice paintings in very few colours, and he also takes commissioned work. The whole design was defined by him and mine was to deliver the PHP, XHTML, CSS and the JavaScript doing the donkey work of rendering his ideas.

Feast your eyes on some nice pop portraits

Onlinetools.org rebranding

Realising that nobody reads instructions on a web site before downloading scripts and seeing that some were just painfully outdated, I stripped down the site to the bare minimum – a list of all the scripts and tools I still consider good. I then wondered where to put a navigation and thought about the idea of making the whole page just a list and spice it up with some JavaScript shenanigans.

Take a peek at the new onlinetools.org

On almost any mailing list or forum you still encounter developers venting their frustration as to how buggy CSS is and how hard it is to switch from table layouts to CSS layouts. A lot of this frustration is not based on bad browsers or missing elements and concepts in CSS, it is based on an old school view of web design. Web design was never easy, but it can be if we start embracing the complexity of our development environment and be flexible enough to develop for it (more…)