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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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Not So Minimal

It’s offi­cial: My first (well, sec­ond really; see below) entry to Dave Shea’s CSS Zen Gar­den has been accepted: Not So Minimal

My orig­i­nal sub­mis­sion was deemed too min­i­mal for Dave’s anti-minimal pol­icy (cov­ered in a pre­vi­ous post) — I don’t dis­agree with this judge­ment, though I still believe min­i­mal design is as valid a style as any other. “Not So Min­i­mal” is the result of a few extra hours spent with my orig­i­nal design, adding some color and the obvi­ous abstract image com­pos­ite for the header.

I’m work­ing now on a few more designs, this time with dif­fer­ent goals (more fluid designs, less grid-like lay­outs, etc.) — they should be ready in a few weeks (work per­mit­ting), and we’ll see how they fare once submitted.

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Tuesday, June 24th, 2003.

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8 comments on “Not So Minimal”

  1. Posted by Kris on Tuesday, June 24th, 2003.

    Please for­give me if I’m wrong… but isn’t it the same design with alter­nate colours? I think I bet­ter go to bed and have a closer look later tonight.

  2. Posted by Dan on Tuesday, June 24th, 2003.

    HI Kris, yes, it’s the same design, altered to bet­ter suit Dave’s anti-minimal design rules for the CSS Zen Gar­den. Dave really liked the orig­i­nal, all-gray design, but since accept­ing it would have gone against the anti-minimal pol­icy he had put in place him­self, he couldn’t accept it as-is. I didn’t want to go back to the draw­ing board com­pletely, so I added in some abstract pho­tog­ra­phy and altered the col­ors (well, added col­ors) to spice it up a bit, and make it a lit­tle less-minimalist.

  3. Posted by VTS on Tuesday, June 24th, 2003.

    Great CSS design. Sim­ple and func­tional. By the way, what font did you use for your sec­tion headings?

  4. Posted by Dan on Wednesday, June 25th, 2003.

    The type­face used is FF DIN Con­densed from FontShop (the sec­tion head­ings are DIN Con­densed BoldAlternate).

    The entire FF DIN fam­ily is great, very ver­sa­tile, though I’ve always pre­ferred the con­densed series; the upper­case and low­er­case char­ac­ters seem to “fit” much bet­ter (“fit” is obvi­ously an extremely tech­ni­cal typo­graph­i­cal term ;-)

  5. Posted by VTS on Wednesday, June 25th, 2003.

    Thanks for the info Dan. I’ve been stuck on a cre­ative funk doing our com­pany site redesign. A cou­ple hours of vol­ley­ball this evening and a new font to play with will sure help. :-)

  6. Posted by Didier Hilhorst on Wednesday, June 25th, 2003.

    Looks great. Period.

  7. Posted by Sunny on Thursday, June 26th, 2003.

    FF Din is a very nice font. But it is a hefty price ($180)! I guess when you are a web design pro, its more of an investment.

  8. Posted by Dan on Thursday, June 26th, 2003.

    If you work with type enough, you start to really appre­ci­ate the extra work which goes into the faces pro­duced by the larger foundries, and the cost becomes lower when com­pared to the extra time you have to spend when deal­ing with lower-quality fonts.

    We use a hand­ful of faces pro­duced by FontShop, and we’ve been thrilled with all of them — if you have the money to spend, you won’t be sorry.

    The other thing to keep in mind is the ver­sa­til­ity of a given type­face for the style of work you do. For instance, the FFDIN, FFInfo and FFIn­ter­state fam­i­lies work very well with the style of work I pro­duce, so it’s worth it to me to have them avail­able. I use type­faces sim­i­lar to the way a pho­tog­ra­pher uses dif­fer­ent lenses, or a painter uses dif­fer­ent brushes: you get used to the ones which work well for your style, and you keep using them over and over again because you know exactly what you will get out of them.

    Then again, if you’re not the kind of per­son who obsesses over type in your day-to-day life, spend­ing a few hun­dred dol­lars on one fam­ily isn’t really necessary :-)