Archives for CSS
How to Avoid Paragraph Gaps when Using Superscript and Subscript
Frequently, when I see a webpage with superscript or subscript text, I see associated gaps in the paragraph. This is caused because the default way browsers render super and subscript text is to add enough vertical space in the paragraph to show them. The result is ugly, but as you can see in the following [...]
Key Takeaways from An Event Apart
I’ve attended An Event Apart four years running now. It is, hands-down, the finest web conference around, and if you work on the web at all, whether you’re a designer, developer, copywriter, or client-services, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Reviewing my notes from previous conferences, I noticed that there were some running themes. Each year, [...]
Welcome to the New Pop Art Blog!
The new Pop Art blog is live! On the front end, it’s sporting a brand-new, and oh-so-spiffy, design, and on the back-end it’s been converted to the titan of the blogging world, Wordpress. Please look around, and enjoy the new scenery. And make sure you take a peek at the new profile pages by clicking [...]
Who’s Afraid of HTML Email?
Anyone who tells you creating HTML email is easy has either never done it, or is lying. Inexperienced designers tend to think, “Oh, no problem, it’s all tables and font tags!” Grizzled veterans, however, know all too well the difficulties of getting anything but the most simple design to render well in a variety of [...]
LP Usual Defects
About six month ago, we launched the first version of Stop the Usual Defects, a microsite for LP to promote the launch of their new engineered wood product, LSL. The concept was to showcase the strengths of LSL by portraying defects in traditional lumber in the style of The Usual Defects. We just reworked the [...]
Bionic Lobster
We recently launched a microsite for Leatherman’s new Bionic Lobster ad campaign. The idea is that a lobster lost his claw during a struggle with a Sea Captain, but stole his Leatherman at the same time. He tied it onto the stump, and became a kind of lobster superhero, freeing his fellow crustaceans from restaurant [...]
Detroit Diesel Redesign
About a month ago, we launched the new Detroit Diesel redesign. We were working on this site when I was first hired at Pop Art, and while I’m proud of the code we wrote the first time, our standards have evolved a bit over time. The opportunity to revisit the site and kick it up [...]
An Event Apart San Francisco 2008
I’ve managed to attend An Event Apart every year so far, and this year was particularly exciting because the nearest location was in San Francisco. I went to Seattle the last two times, which was fine, but I know Seattle pretty well, so the opportunity to play tourist in a new city was very appealing [...]
IE Double-Float CSS Bug
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.
The Email Standards Project
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 [...]
Pop Art is Hiring
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 [...]
Duplicate Work is a Bug
“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
41 Useful CSS Links
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 [...]
Selling Web Standards is Hard
I recently had a fascinating conversation with our VP of Client Services. Long story short, I learned that selling web standards is difficult, because many of the benefits it offers are “soft.” For instance, if we tell a client that the extra money we charged them to upgrade their site to web standards will make [...]
Citations, Emphasis and Italics
Wanna get a headache? Go type “html book titles italic em” into Google and read for about 15 minutes. What you’re looking at is an intense debate over the best way to mark up a book title using HTML. I’ll save you some time and tell you that after several hours, my conclusion is that [...]
An Event Apart Seattle 2007
Last year, I attended An Event Apart 2006 in Seattle. It was a great event, although I remember it being really rushed, because they seven sessions packed into one day. So when I heard that they were coming back to Seattle, and had changed the format to two days, I signed up right away. I’m [...]
Pop Art Launches Two New Freightliner Trucks Sites
Pop Art has launched two sites that we’re really excited about, Visit Cascadia and Drive Cascadia to promote the launch of a groundbreaking new truck, the Freightliner Cascadia™. Visit Cascadia Visit Cascadia is a tourism site for a fictional town called Cascadia. Imagine the perfect trucktopia that inspired by the features and benefits of their official truck, the [...]
How Web Standards Made a Better Site for LP
What started as a simple project with LP to redesign their top-level landing pages quickly grew to encompass their entire site. This brought with it some surprising logistical difficulties, which the Pop Art team overcame through clever use of web standards. The end result is a new look applied across the entire site, with the [...]
Bulletproof Web Design: One Paragraph Review
Having already written a book introducing readers to the web standards movement, Dan Cedarholm returns to cover more advanced material. While his first focused on markup and basic scenarios like grocery lists, this book focuses on CSS and accessibility. In particular, he explores how to let a web page flex around things like large font [...]
November Accomplishments
SelecTrucks Center Sites We launched two new Center Sites in November. Kansas City was a challenging design, with lots of absolute positioning, which caused a few problems when IE7 came out. The client was really excited about the puzzle theme. Birmingham is, I think, one of the best looking designs we've done. The diagonal navigation is [...]
CSS Mastery: One Paragraph Review
In the introduction to this book, Andy Budd writes “There are an increasing number of CSS resources around, yet you only have to look at a CSS mailing list to see the same questions popping up time and again.” In that sentence, he’s neatly summarized this book. The material contained here is certainly available elsewhere, [...]
Web Standards Solutions: One Paragraph Review
Dan Cedarholm has written a very nice book introducing the reader to the concept of web standards. Unlike Zeldman’s book, which is nearly all theory, this book is heavily focused on markup techniques, with some basic introduction to CSS. Each chapter presents a variety of scenarios, such as how to mark up a grocery list. [...]
Eric Meyer on CSS: One Paragraph Review
Eric Meyer, known in the web community as the Godfather of CSS, has written several more technical books about CSS for O’Reilly, but this book, as well as its sequel, are intended as a more practical, hands-on set of tutorials. In both books, he presents a series of common scenarios such as adding a calendar [...]
Tim Berners-Lee on the shift to XHTML
"The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn't work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn't complain. …It is important to maintain HTML incrementally, as well as continuing a transition to well-formed [...]
Google Could Save Bandwidth with Web Standards
I've heard the story that Google uses non-standard markup on their site to save bandwidth many times, but Roger Johansson from 456 Berea Street shows us that's just a myth.
