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: Design BlogPNG32 hacks and IE6. Is it worth it?
Last year you might remember me running through what I thought were the under-appreciated qualities of an image file format that seems to slip under the radar — the PNG8.
Namely:
- Small files sizes
- Graded alpha-transparency in all current browsers
- No requirement for potentially brittle hacks requiring JavaScript, ActiveX and/or other proprietary technologies.
Although, admittedly, you had to be prepared to slightly lower your expectations of the render in IE6, we considered the trade-off generally worthwhile — particularly as you begin to hone your skill for producing PNG8 images that degrade nicely in IE6. Personally I haven’t ruled out using PNG32 in certain situations, but PNG8 is certainly my weapon of choice.
Bearing this in mind, it was great to read a really interesting post on PNG32 hacks and IE6 by George Reilly on the new Cozi Tech Blog. For a little background, George spent seven years working on IIS at Microsoft, and as such has two things most of us can’t claim:
- an array of hard won Microsoft ninja debugging skills
- a black book of Microsoft contacts to quiz about nonsensical IE6 voodoo
Nevertheless after deploying the time-honored IE6 PNG32 hack in a project, …
Remove Color Casts Using Photoshop Lab Color
Color Correction is one of those things you don’t get a lot of practice on as a web designer, so I thought we might look the quick and mostly foolproof method I prefer to use.
Let’s start with a question. What is this? (see blue chip to the right). If you said, "it’s a particularly pleasant shade of blue," you’d be at least partially right.
However, you’d be only be 100% correct if you said, "a zoomed up section of Cameron Adams’ cheek," for, as you can see the photo below, the man in blue was the man of blue the day this particular picture was taken.
Now, this is a great photo, but it presented problems when I came to use it as his author shot on a book cover. While the blue tint looks pretty cool in isolation, it comes off a bit odd when placed alongside a handful of normal, pinky-yellow toned author shots. I needed to moderate the blue tint (or more correctly "cast"), but as …
99designs launches!
It’s an emotional moment when a child grows up and leaves home for the first time. The parents fret about whether their little baby will be able to fend for themselves on their own. Undeterred, the child throws himself, wide-eyed and fearless, into the big, wide world.
Today, Lachlan, Mark and Paul officially separated SitePoint Contests from the family to launch 99designs.
The launch is only the first stage of the 99designs re-branding — some of the features are new, such as user pages and the credit purchase process. The really cool stuff, however, will be rolled out over the next month or so.
As a bonus, the credit balance of any former participants in SitePoint Contests has been copied across to 99designs, effectively giving users a stack of free credits that they can begin using immediately. See the official 99designs blog for more information.
On behalf of the team at SitePoint we wish you guys the very best of luck, and we look forward to watching 99designs grow!
Oprah’s Book Club? I don’t think so…
Some of you will already know The Interaction Design Association (IxDA) mail list. For those that don’t know it, the website and mail list are great resources and sources of discussion for anyone interested in interaction design, user experience and design.
The IxDA is a member-supported organization committed to serving the needs of the international interaction design community. With the help of more than 1,500 members worldwide, we provide a forum for the discussion of interaction design issues.
Now, as Michael Jackson once said: “I’m a lurker, not a writer”.. OK well maybe that was me. But all the same, there’s been a really good discussion going on over the last few days that I’ve been watching with great interest. List members have been posting ‘The One Book’ they’d recommend to Engineering Management folk (or anyone else for that matter, I’d venture).
So without further ado, here’s a summary of some great reading on User Experience, Usability, and Interaction Design:
- The Inmates are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper
- Designing from Both Sides of the Screen: How Designers and Engineers Can Collaborate to Build Cooperative Technology, Ellen Isaacs & Alan Walendowski
- Communicating Design, Dan Brown
- The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman
- Subject To …
99designs Logo Contest Winner Announced!
The most popular design contest ever held on SitePoint — to design the logo for the next evolution of SitePoint’s Design Contests, 99designs — has come to a close, and a winner has been announced!
In what was by far the largest contest to date in terms of both entrants and designs submitted, Bonic’s simple design incorporating a sketched folder (indicating thumbnail sketches that are part of the design process) has been declared the winning logo that will be used to shape the identity of 99designs.
Here are some statistics about the contest:
- First prize: $1,000
- Second prize: $200
- Number of designers: 311
- Number of submissions: 1472
- Contest length (days): 4
- Number of star ratings left: 280
- Number of contest comments: 191
- Number of feedback comments: 1304
I’ve written before about what makes a good design contest, and there are a couple of lessons that contest holders can take away from this contest to ensure that future contests are successful. For example, in addition to offering a reasonable prize and being prompt and diligent when leaving feedback, a winner for this contest was selected even though the design still needs some tweaking.
Another decision that made this contest successful was to award a second prize winner (congratulations designabot!). …
The Best Web Design Comics
Many web designers are also closet comic-book nerds.
Andy Clarke came out of the closet at Web Directions South earlier this year when he spoke about finding inspiration for web design in comic book art.
I’ve noticed that a lot of other geeks have not only been embracing their love for comics, but writing their own. In fact, when a web designer or developer with a creative streak turns his or her hand to drawing comics, it can produce very interesting results. More than just a lunchtime distraction, comic strips about our profession can lead to insights about how and why we do what we do. Plus, keeping oneself abreast of what is happening in our industry includes not only knowing what people are talking about, but what they’re laughing about.
Seeing as a Google search for the terms “web design comic” or “tech comic” either throws up nothing or just a bunch of rubbish, I thought I’d post my favourite comics about web design. I don’t pretend it’s an exhaustive list — I’m hoping you’ll help me out by listing your own favourite geeky comics in the comments.
First up, and my hands-down favourite, is Kopozky (http://kopozky.net). This is really the only comic …
Design Contests Needs An Identity
If you’ve been following the SitePoint development blog, you’ll know that the SitePoint’s design contests is in the process of being relaunched as 99designs.
Given the nature of this community, it seems only fitting that the logo design for the new site be opened up as a contest to the members of the community that use the site.
From the brief:
99designs is the upcoming evolution of the SitePoint Design Contests, and as is only fitting we are holding a design contest for our new logo. The logo must fit in with the designs for the new site. We are looking for a fresh, simple logo and are offering a prize of $1,000, and we are guaranteeing that a winner will be selected and paid.
The contest went live today and will run for the next four days. There are already a handful of promising submissions, but if you think you can do better, get designing!
Currently experiencing some weird behaviour with Wordpress tags. Apologies to any readers who received this post multiple times in their feed reader. We’re working to get it fixed so it doesn’t happen again!
Fixed!
Stretchy Images with HTML and CSS
The following is a little piece published in the last Design View.
At the time of publishing, I noted that IE7 allowed you use CSS to set an image width to a percentage (for instance, 30%), but that it failed to re-calculate that percentage if you resized the browser and a full refresh was required to force the graphic to resize.
Resident CSS guru and co-writer of our new CSS reference, Paul O’Brien has pointed out a nice solution to this bug that I’ll detail below.
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Sometimes, the Web’s greatest strength can also be its biggest Achilles’ heel.
As clever as web content can be at reformatting itself for different devices and screen sizes, there’s one layout issue I always battle with — the fact that liquid site layouts stretch and images don’t.
While a layout can stretch and contract, and text can flow and wrap, images are assigned a pixel size at birth, and that’s precisely how they’re displayed thereafter, regardless of their surroundings.
In most typical article or blog post layouts, this doesn’t present a huge issue. On a really large screen, …
How To Run A Successful Design Contest
Sahar Sarid of conceptualist.com knows how to run a design contest.
Last week he announced the winner of the $2,500 prize money offered via the logo design contest that he ran at SitePoint (the winner was John Wik for this entry).
It’s interesting to look at the process that Sahar followed, as the contest holder, to ensure that he was getting value for money in return for the prize on offer. For example:
- He offered a large cash prize, guaranteeing that the best designers from the community would take notice. In fact, this was the largest prize awarded for a single design contest to date.
- He was clear and detailed in his initial brief.
- He was prompt and thorough in giving feedback to each designer’s submission. In fact, 576 of the 745 feedback posts were Sahar’s — as were many of the 212 comments for the contest — totaling 313,872 characters or about 52,000 words!
- He insisted on being part of the process. This is one factor that many detractors of design contests cite as being a failing in on-spec work: that client communication is taken out of the loop, resulting in lower quality work. By requesting that each designer …
WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has released a last call for comments on the working draft of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0… again:
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group invites you to review the second WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft published on 11 December 2007. WCAG 2.0 explains how to make Web sites, applications, and other content accessible to people with disabilities. Please submit any comments on the following document by 1 February 2008.
This second WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft is provided for public review of the document now that it has all resolutions from previous comments incorporated. The WCAG Working Group hopes that it has resolved all substantive issues with this draft, and looks forward to progressing to the next stages in completing WCAG 2.0.
Leave your comments on whether you think any progress has been made here at the W3C site.
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