Pop Art Blog

Has anyone seen this problem before and have any idea how to solve it? In firefox, the text wraps around both floats correctly. In IE6/7, the text only wraps around the second float. Read More...

I sent an email to the Creative Team suggesting an exchange program where a Development Team member would attend their team meeting. I ended by asking when and where their next team meeting would be. I got three replies. Ben Fogarty : "Hey Man... We're creative. We meet on a whim. Where the wind blows us. Our sails are filled with unicorn tears and our fists the thunder of zeus." Thom Schoenborn : "Midnight under the Burnside Bridge, west side, upon the ninth moon in the year of... Read More...

WebVisions is a Portland-based web conference that I’ve attended twice before . Sadly, due to a crisis at the office, I was only able to attend the first day of sessions this year, which means I missed Andy Baio’s presentation on internet memes and Jeffrey Veen’s keynote . What I did see was good, but not great. In a nutshell, I think that WebVisions is a B-grade conference that’s trying desperately to become an A-grade one. It has moments of greatness, and manages to attract... Read More...

When we first moved into our new building, Dave wrote "Door-Close button in elevator does nothing" on the maintenance list, and the handyman replied "Button functions as intended" or something along those lines. Well, turns out they're BOTH right. I was reading an article that Kottke linked to about elevators, and there was a little bit in there about how the door close buttons don't do anything in modern elevators! "In most elevators, at least in any built or installed... Read More...

"I print out all my e-mails and tape them to the inside of my clothes. I know Levi and Justin use their iPhones to access e-mail outside work, but my clothes come with me everywhere, and they don't set off airport alarms. I have a DD hat, a Freightliner jacket, a Leatherman belt, and a Screaming Circuits beanie. It works for me." -- Dave, responding to a discussion about email sorting methods Read More...

Hooray! The feedback from the web development community convinced the IE development team to change their minds about the default setting for version targeting in IE8 (as I discussed in a previous post ). “In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting ‘Standards’ mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s ‘IE7 Standards mode’ will... Read More...

Previously on Web Developer Controversies: Aaron Gustafson from the Internet Explorer development team announced that IE8 will use a META tag to kick the engine into standards mode by targeting a specific browser version, something that was previously done by using a valid DOCTYPE. A lot of people, including Jeremy Keith, think this is a bad idea. Here are some of the more interesting points that have been raised in the discussion so far. “If IE8 acts like IE8 by default, then IE8 might break... Read More...

In 1998, Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded the Web Standards Project to fight for better support of web standards from the browser manufacturers and web developers. It was a success, if for no other reason than it provided a flag to rally behind. This year, the Email Standards Project was founded to rally support for web standards in email clients. The Email Standards Project is about working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email... Read More...

Pop Art is currently hiring for several positions , including an account director , a .NET web developer , and most important to me, a front-end web developer . If you're interested in any of those positions, feel free to apply. Now, allow me to wax poetic about the front-end developer position for a moment. If you've read my manifesto of a web producer , then you know that I feel that production work is a separate specialization from design and programming. Here at Pop Art, I've been... Read More...

"The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging." -- Jeffrey Zeldman, Understanding Web Design Read More...

"You’ll sometimes hear people joke that good programmers are 'lazy', and what this means is simply that good programmers tend to see duplicated work as a bug, and try to fix it." -- James Bennett, discussing CSS frameworks Read More...

"I’d rather answer a few dumb questions than put up with a few dumb assumptions." -- Aaron Cannon , in reply to a question about whether he tires of people asking him about his blindness Read More...

This magazine cover is a perfect example of why you should always have someone else review any art decisions you make. There are several things in this illustration that don’t make any sense… The kid on the left, I assume, is supposed to represent current, cutting-edge technology — hence, the Web 2.0 shirt — so why is he playing Pong? I guess that old is represented by wearing a tie, being unshaven, and working, while youth is represented by spiking your hair, getting a facial... Read More...

“I was a baker. You can’t just turn up the oven and expect to take the bread out sooner.” – Eric Danielson, NorthTemple.com QA lead, commenting on the futility of trying to rush some kinds of development . Read More...

I was clearing out my bookmarks recently, and noticed that I had a pretty large collection of web development and CSS-related bookmarks that I never refer to any more, but might be useful to people who are just getting started with CSS. So with that in mind, here’s a collection of links, and I hope it helps you out! Browser Testing You’ll probably be spending a lot of time testing your designs in different browsers. The old-school way to do this is to physically install every browser you might have... Read More...