CSS Reboot - 16 days and counting!
With a little over two weeks to go until the big day, I have finally come to the realisation that the ‘design’ I have been tweaking for the last few weeks is too different, too ambitious, and too damn difficult to get working properly to be used as a serious blog site. I also found that as I thought more about the Information Architecture that I had absolutely no idea how it was going to work so, as of today, I have started again from a blank piece of paper and a more conservative design viewpoint.
Of course the fact that the big freelance job I’m working on is also due to launch on May 1st doesn’t help either…
If anyone is interested, here is the working prototype of my discarded ‘design’, codename Four. It was an exercise in user-controlled interface design and excessive Javascript – click on any section to bring it to the front, and try moving the four ‘panes’ around the screen – and, while I think it could still be an interesting approach to website interface design, I just couldn’t come up with a way to usefully present blog entries in such a small text area.
Reboot #2
The good news, though, is that the (decidedly more sensible) redesign of my second reboot site is virtually finished, and already partially integrated into Textpattern RC3.
Rebooting the Reboot
In between two redesigns and several freelance projects, I’ve also been working on the behind the scenes scripting for the CSS Reboot site itself. It’s been a great opportunity to develop my Javascript skills, and a chance to try out this AJAX stuff that everyone’s been talking about.
I’d like to thank Adam Howell for the chance to get involved in what has become a fairly high-profile project (courtesy of some link-love from a certain Mr Zeldman among others) – it’s certainly made my stats look a little healthier than normal; pity I chose this week to accidentally break .htaccess and kill my CSS for a few days…
Filed under: Design.
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Comments
- Korbo
- 1237 days ago
- Just a wild thought as I read. Could the same effect of rising layers be achieved using :focus on a div to up it’s z-index? (That’d be one of the first time it’s properly used too.) Less possibilities but less coding too! I’ll give it a look in a day or two myself.
- #1
- Matthew Pennell
- 1237 days ago
- Korbo: That was originally what I had (before I decided to make it possible to move the sections around), but when I integrated the dragging code the original ‘popToTop’ script became redundant so I removed it.
- #2
- Jane Jolin
- 1134 days ago
- I’m very excited about the project as I just finished a design theme for csszengarden.com
You can have a look at http://www.celebrityblog.net/zengarden/zengarden-sample.htm - #3
