Pelago :: web design & development blog » design

Intervals Logos

John — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 16:30:44 +0000

Dug up some logo ideas from the archives. Here are some of the logos we tossed around for Intervals before settling on the final one.

Become a CSS god

Cameron — Fri, 11 May 2007 16:16:08 +0000

Smashing Magazine, which I had heretofore never heard of, has an excellent article called 70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding. The post is full of a wide range of wonderful suggestions on how to get the most out of your CSS-based designs, compiled from blog postings from other designers around the web. Every designer tends to have his or her own set of rules to go by when building a site or “chopping” a designers renderings into into XHTML/CSS. I have my own, and you can see it by just viewing the source code on this site and checking out the CSS here. However, it’s always great to see what other designers have come up with.

Some of the suggestions seem so obvious you wouldn’t think they would deserve a mention:

1 ID per page, many classes per page. “Check your IDs: Only one element in a document can have a certain value for the id attribute, while any number of elements can share the same class name. [..] Class and id names can only consist of the characters [A-Za-z0-9] and hyphen (-), and they cannot start with a hyphen or a digit (see CSS2 syntax and basic data types).” [Roger Johansson]

But some suggestions seem so obvious you wonder, “Why didn’t I think of that before?!?!?!”:

Organize your CSS-styles, using master style sheets. “Organizing your CSS helps with future maintainability of the site. Start with a master style sheet. Within this style sheet import your reset.css, global.css, flash.css (if needed) and structure.css and on occasion a typography style sheet.”

This is such a novel idea, but such a good one.

Many suggestions rely on versions of CSS that aren’t supported in “major” browsers, and some suggestions rely on CSS hacks to get around browser inconsistencies. That being said, every CSS coder, from beginner to expert, will find something valuable here. As for me, I am making it a point from now on to improve the organization of my CSS code. Thanks Smashing Magazine!

Pelago Redesign

John — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 19:18:37 +0000

Six years is far too old for any excuse, especially the one we were using for not redesigning our web site: “We’re too busy with client work to redesign our own site, that’s a good thing, right?”

That is not a good thing. We finally decided to take ourselves more seriously and solved the problem by making ourselves a client. We had a rushed timeline and no budget, but we had to get it done. And we did. In a record four weeks.

The driving philosophy behind the new design is that Pelago is a place where lifestyle and hard work are equally important. We live in a city bordered by mountains and ocean but we often forget they are there. We want this new site to convey some of the playfulness that is Pelago.

It was important that our new design not get caught in the crossfire of photoshop filters that have exemplified most of the web 2.0 movement. Gradients, drop shadows, glows, reflections, and their ilk, have their small and overcrowded place. The Pelago site goes beyond the current fads prevalent in web design, because Pelago was churning out good design well before web 2.0 got started, and we’ll still be doing so when the trend dies out.