Originally made for the July Crescendo, a month and a few name changes later, the podcast and accompanying artwork go live today.

It’s quite fun to do podcast artwork; well recommended. Thanks for the chance Si!

Colourful crescendo originally appeared on Candy by James on 15 August 2008.

There are three main ways to define your layout in web design: fixed, elastic & liquid. Having written about the differences between them before, I’ll suffice with stating that fixed layouts are defined in “px” (pixels) and liquid ones in “%” (percentages).

Using a fixed layout means your web page is the same width irrespective of the viewers’ screen width, like so:

Using a liquid layout however, means your web page scales along with the viewers’ screen width, like so:

Liquid layouts used to have an edge over pixel layouts in the sense that they increased use of the screen real estate, thus providing more room if the viewer increased their text-size. Line-lengths are hard to control with liquid layouts, because of varying screen-sizes obviously, but also when the viewer increases (just) the text-size. Jason Kottke posted a good warning about line-lengths in liquid layouts a while back:

Attention liquid designers: take a gander at this portion of an ancient Egyptian parchment on papyrus from the Louvre. Even the ancient Egyptians knew not to make columns of text too wide.

Now, however, most browsers have adopted full-page zooming over text-size zooming. Most provide both, but full-page zooming is the new default. Full-page zooming gives users with a wider screen (for example) the chance to increase the size of text and images, while still preserving the ratios of fixed layout pages, like so:

As you can see, full-page zooming means fixed layouts also provide increased use of screen real estate, but only when needed. In addition fixed layouts keep line-lengths relatively stable, and are easy to work with as they are based on pixels, just like images, videos and other objects you may have on your web page.

Bye bye liquid layouts! originally appeared on Candy by James on 8 June 2008.

Now with full-page zoom being implemented (as default!) in Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3 and Opera 9*, it’s a different story. Full-page zooming means your easy px-based layout will be fully flexible. Even more flexible than most em-based layouts in fact, as images will scale along too.

So I’m asking myself, why bother with hard-to-keep-from-breaking em-based layouts?

[update] I don’t think liquid layouts are relevant anymore either.

[update 2] * And now Safari too! That’s all of the major browsers.

PS. This still leaves percentage-based layouts of course, but they maximise screen real estate. Which is very different from maximising readability (line-lengths and all that jazz). As far as I can see, %-based layouts are good for some web-apps (like gmail) but aren’t optimal for other uses.

Px vs Em: Is it still relevant? originally appeared on Candy by James on 31 March 2008.

This is my first attempt at the method, and it’s not too shabby, is it! So many thanks to Joen for sharing his wisdom with me (and you).

On a related note, you should check out his projects and portfolio — I hear he’s available for design work and I know he’s very good.

Fun smoke originally appeared on Candy by James on 3 November 2007.

Update: Blimey! I got it wrong apparently. They still shouldn’t have made it fat in my opinion. Who knows what’ll happen in the next update! (And who knows how well this line of nano’s will sell!)

Update 2: Wha-hey! I got it right! Only took apple a year to catch up ;)

Fat nano? originally appeared on Candy by James on 4 September 2007.

Take the ‘innovative’ epilepsy inducing new-look branding film (I’m not kidding about the epilepsy attacks, beware!). Is it really that innovative? Hmmmmmm. Let’s have a look.

Graphics flowing through a city all squiggly-like has been done in a number of ads and music videos, including “Shitty Bum by C-mon & Kypski” (2004 or earlier, by the way). Okay, so that part isn’t original.

What about the psychedelic colour changes? Overused throughout the eighties, the best known example probably being the MTV Launch video (1981).

However, there’s a quote in the aforlinked BBC article which makes me believe it’s not all bad:

“The logo came up on TV and I was thinking about the 2012 Games and then I was out,” said [Christopher Filmer, who needed to go to hospital after a seisure].

Because thank goodness, at least it’s on message.

London 2012 branding originally appeared on Candy by James on 6 June 2007.

A cityscape by Craig Mullins

Once you realise that it’s quite an achievement to make the aforementioned melting pot of architecture all come together and you can see why I think it’s even more amazing than it looks.

If you check out the rest of Craig’s Gallery you’ll find even more amazing images.

Amazing Cityscape originally appeared on Candy by James on 17 August 2006.

What does your pepper mill look like?

Tabletop inspiration originally appeared on Candy by James on 6 August 2006.

May I be the first to congratulate you on Pangea! It really does take good care of your sites whole ecosystem, while being so clear and effective it positively hurts! It’s nice to have a useful homepage, the instalment box in particular is a great feature. For the rest, great aligning, fantastic white space — not that we expect anything less of course :)

The attention to detail is pretty darn good too. Even the X to close the comment-formatting-box has a highlight state! And to my surprise the wee bite you’ve taken out of the top-right of the boxes break up the boxxyness enough — even though they’re really small bites.

Solid design, and I can’t wait what colours you’ll inject with one of your (semi)-monthly redesigns.

~ source: Noscope Pangea

Noscope redesigned: Pangea launched! originally appeared on Candy by James on 14 June 2006.

Sobre negro by Monica Calvo originally appeared on Candy by James on 12 May 2006.

And what marvellous sketches he produces! Take this one, “knowing when to stop” (that might just be the name of the post and not of the piece itself, but there’s no other name mentioned):

This was a 4’x5’ acrylic piece in mid-production—I try to document my work through its phases to study the thought process at a later time. It turns out that this was best it got before it went into its irreversible direction. Now it just stands to be gessoed over. It’s difficult to will a painting into the optimal direction because many strokes open new possibilities.
~ source: Splashy Fish

Now this piece might not be everyone’s taste, but I like it. It’s awesome.

Knowing when to stop he says originally appeared on Candy by James on 3 May 2006.

Notable changes are the general shifts in alignment (not just for improved flow, but also to give me more room for in-line images), the background and navigation bar colour shift (both are now slightly lighter) and boxes around the comments (just like noscope — I plead guilty!). I’ll have to redesign the comments once I enable gravatars too (instead of just favicons), but this will have to do for now.

New additions are Cameron Moll’s icon to my inspirations list (not that he’s a recent find, but up till now I didn’t have a good icon to work from), “latest comments” in the sidebar and a (slightly different one from on the main page) sidebar for the single-post pages (just click a title to get to them).

Funnily enough, the thing I’m most proud of is moving the previous/next page navigation on single-post pages to the sidebar. It’s a very little change, but I really feel they work a lot better there.

What do you think? (Oh and don’t forget to vote for me on the CSS Reboot site!)

Candy: rebooted originally appeared on Candy by James on 1 May 2006.

For Adacio pour homme, high-street billboards were of course the logical choice:

Other agencies have supported us too — the viral Indiana Jones ad is my fav however.

Adactio (pour homme et femme) originally appeared on Candy by James on 25 April 2006.

I found this beautiful photo on flickr a while ago. It depicts a building from a great angle during a wonderful sunset. Called ‘Angulos’ it depicts the La Serena in Chile.

Some more exquisite and inspirational buildings:

Walkway near Covent garden

Seattle Public Library

Inspirational photos originally appeared on Candy by James on 22 April 2006.