Month: May 2003

I’ve been inspired by Douglas Bowman’s submission to the CSS Zen Garden — Golden Mean is an excellent example of what can be done with CSS and some good design skills (not that the other selections are terrible, quite the contrary; however, Douglas’ entry is absolutely stunning in my opinion).

I had been holding off putting a design together for the Garden, primarily because I’m already putting too many hours into non-profit projects (hmm, my bank account balance only has 3 digits before the .00 — is that bad?), but now I’m determined to put my skills to work — I can’t outdesign Mr. Bowman, but I’ll do my best to contribute to the project and its purpose.

I’ll post updates when the design is complete.

I’ve now officially entered into the pattern-creation craze. Tasteful pixel patterns are making a comback as web site backgrounds (Todd Dominey’s What Do I Know? is one good example), and I’m almost finished with a new project that uses a nice pattern for the background, so I figured it was time I created some of my own.

Enter K10k: Patterns.

My first two submissions are Complex Gray and Diamond Blue (you can get to them directly by using the “View by name…” pop-up menu), and I’m pretty happy with the way they’ve turned out.

Those of you who visit this site daily will have noticed a few sporadic changes over the last week. This site (if you didn’t realize it already) is being redesigned in public (polite nod to Zeldman), and as such you may need to reload the page to see everything correctly. You might even need to reload the stylesheet(s) to see the changes:

• basic.css
• default_color.css
• alt_color2.css
• alt_color3.css
• alt_dark.css
• alt_daringfireball.css

The style switcher in the sidebar has been converted to images (rather than the original text format), so it takes up less vertical space and thus can be left visible at all times. An additional alternate color scheme has been added as an homage to DaringFireball, Jon Grubers terrific blog. I hope he doesn’t sue me or anything…

Also added is a rotating image on the home page and a few sub-pages. The script used to select and display the random images is by Charles Dietlein, and it kicks butt.

Please comment on these changes/additions, and let me know if there’s anything else you’d like to see me try :-)

Every designer has at least one design they would never admit ownership of, even under oath; some of us have a slightly higher number, and I’ve just been reminded of most of my own.

I’ve been reviewing my collection of work recently, for various reasons ranging from self promotion to just digging up old ZIP disks used for project archives, and after spending a good deal of time reviewing over 7 years of my personal efforts (in graphic design and web design), I have reached some conclusions which I thought I would share with you in the form of my new Personal Rules of Design.

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