A Path Less Taken

Smashing Magazine recently published several articles on Color Theory for Designers. I thought they were pretty easy reads with an interesting perspective so I decided to link them here.

• Color Theory for Designers, Part 1: The Meaning of Color
• Color Theory for Designers, Part 2: Understanding Concepts and Terminology

I’m a developer. Specifically these days, I’m a web developer. I enjoy spending time creating solutions (read applications) for the web. A key part of building a good web application is an effective layout. When I started my new project I went looking for something to help simplify the process of getting a good web 2.0 layout. What I found was the 960 Grid System. This clean and elegant CSS Framework developed by Nathan Smith is both easy and fun to use.

Building good looking web layouts is a PAIN for a programmer like me. I was recently doing some research and came across a post on Fluid Grids on A List Apart. The article describes in great detail an approach for building grid based CSS layouts that are fluid across different screen resolutions / browsers. This is really interesting to a programmer like me so I posted it here for others to check out. If any of my readers (all 3 of you) have any suggestions for the “best” CSS Framework for a non-designer please post a comment and let me know. I’m looking for all the help I can get.

I wanted to add pull quotes to my blog posts for added impact. I was taking a break from doing research on the topic when I just happened to come across David Walsh’s post entitled Better Pull Quotes with MooTools. I’m not a MooTools user, but David’s post mentioned that his effort was based on Chris Coyier’s post on CSS-Tricks titled Better Pull Quotes: Don’t Repeat Markup. I checked out the post and it seemed easy to implement, so I decided to give it a go. As Chris says, “Pull quotes are wonderful.“

Lately my eye has been wondering. Yes, it’s true, I’ve been looking at other blogging software. I don’t really plan to move, but I wanted to see what was out there. I found a really good post at Dan and Cheryl’s Place that gives a new users perspective on both Movable Type and WordPresss. I thought it was worth the read.