So back to the subject of this post: wallpaper. I regularly feature wallpaper of house music I like, or rather wallpapers based on the artwork of house music that I like. Now apparently, I have the need to create a wallpaper out of everything I open in photoshop. I was supposed to be creating a cover for an upcoming podcast of One Phat DJ, when I realised I wasn’t busy creating a cover at all — it was a wallpaper! So while that means I had to go back to the drawing board, I still thought it’d be nice to share it with all of you.

The “One Phat DJ — Pro” wallpaper is based on a Sam Hardacre sketch of the One Phat DJ character as featured on the April ’08 Warm Up cover. While it’s obviously inspired by the NBA logo, this style seems to be used for a lot of pro sports now, even pro gaming!

It’s available for download in both wide-screen and square format. Feel free to use this wallpaper at home or at work, but please don’t redistribute (just link here).

Enjoy!

One Phat DJ — Pro Wallpaper originally appeared on Candy by James on 2 June 2008.

Quite beautiful artwork too I might add. This particular image was extracted from the 2005 launch-parties’ flyer design, which was posted on the website back then. All I’ve done is crop it and extend it a bit, so all credit should still go to the aforementioned Jason Brooks. So without further ado:

This is the full 1280x1024 adaptation, with a nice rounded white border running at the top and left.

And for smaller screens (like my own) I’ve created a 10x7 version, which is slightly cropped compared to the original. Enjoy them both!

Tokyo Project Wallpaper originally appeared on Candy by James on 4 November 2007.

However, aside from a few practical issues, microformats are a fundamentally flawed idea.

Microformats are an attempt at client side innovation. Looking at the history of (x)html, javascript and css (the three main client side technologies), you can see it’s rife with incompatibilities. The standardised versions of said technologies have also had (and continue to have) very long market penetration times (the time it takes for the support of a technology to spread among end users).

The funny thing is that these problems can be mitigated by something very simple; server side innovation! It’d have a couple of huge advantages. First-off, it’d give more control over the user experience. Since microformats don’t define how they should be handled by User Agents (UA’s, like browsers or mail clients), you have no way of knowing how your code will exactly be interpreted by them.

Secondly, it allows you to use more compatible technology on the client side (html, css, vCards, pdf, you name it). This means it would work, right now, for everyone. Also, especially for sites that use a CMS (system to manage a sites’ content), server side solutions are a lot easier to implement.

A few examples of microformats, and an explanation why they don’t provide any (business) benefits:

hCard — Have extra mark-up so you can point to an external site which produces a vCard? Mark-up which might force you to deal with UA’s which may mess up the resulting vCard because they interpret hCards differently? Why not just upload a vCard or have your CMS generate a vCard automatically?

hAtom — Making the page itself it’s own feed? So the full, heavy, page can be pinged by feed readers all the time, using far more bandwidth and messing up stats? Are you kidding me?

So yes, I do think that microformats are not worth implementing yourself.

No business benefits for microformats originally appeared on Candy by James on 9 May 2007.

Their music is regularly highlighted by Simon Jobling in his One Phat DJ podcast, so I thought it might be nice to highlight the artwork associated with Fierce Angels (and Tokyo Project & Hed Kandi before). The artist in question is none other than the ever excellent — and master of vector illustration — Jason Brooks.

For your enjoyment, a wallpaper on the cover art of the ‘Digital Angel’ CD release by Fierce Angels.

Artwork was alas from a heavily artifacted jpeg (clearing up was one hell of a job I’ll tell ya) but Jason Brooks’ masterfulness should still shine through.

Different sizes are available: 14x9 Widescreen, 10x7 Smallscreen, 12x10 Bigscreen, .

Digital Angels Wallpaper originally appeared on Candy by James on 5 May 2007.

Bite Size Standards, a project that has taken up quite a lot of my time has launched today. It was initiated by John Oxton of Joshuaink fame, but as CSS guy all parties had to deal with me, so I ended up doing and influencing a lot. It’s been really fun to work with the whole team and it’s been particularly great to finally shush out some semantic and accessibility queries. So for now, I’ll just leave you with a description of what Bite Size Standards is.

Bite Size Standards aims to offer concise web development tutorials, tips and tricks. Written by designers and developers who are passionate about web standards.

A full slightly longer write-up of what we actually went through and why we did certain things will come a lot later and can be found on my portfolio.

Bite Size Standards launches originally appeared on Candy by James on 14 April 2006.

( ~ Work from the Duarte Design Agency for their client Prophetik.)

Subtle Grid Aligning originally appeared on Candy by James on 9 March 2006.

But what does one write on such an occasion? Is “I’d like to thank my family, my friends, the guys at gameover.com, my clients, Programmers Notepad, all the nice people at Adobe — oh and Johnny, couldn’t have done it without you! *cue tears* ” really over the top? A tad too much eh?

Well, how about “Thank you for this token of your recognition of my hard work and pure SEO, but I refuse to believe that my Journal is a better webdesign portfolio than my Portfolio. It’s not right I tell you, It’s not right!”. Is that better? Make me seem like an ungrateful so-and-so? Hmm, you’re probably right..

So what does one say on such a joyous occasion?

Guess who’s nr. 1 for ‘Webdesign Portfolio’ ? originally appeared on Candy by James on 25 February 2006.

My first go. I had originally thought of remaking the ‘Saw 2′ poster by exchanging fingers for pods, but as I was looking for source material I came across the ‘Silence of the Lambs’ poster. Somehow that got me thinking of Podcasts — and the rest was history!

During my research for the Saw 2 poster I also found an article about movie posters using two fingers to indicate a sequel. Among the posters listed was the Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle poster…mmmm. Looking at that poster, my mind naturally pondered how easy it’d be to fit in a Nano into Cameron Diaz’ hand. Thus “Steve’s Angels” was born.

Saul Bass’ Anatomy of a Murder poster + Ipod’s ad campaign. I’ll say no more except that if you look closely, you’ll see some nice details! (Isn’t as good as the iZombie though.)

I designed a Steve Jobs Movie Poster (Well Alright, Three) originally appeared on Candy by James on 7 January 2006.

Every day I see evidence that we are losing our ability to understand and appreciate effective design — trading our appreciation and understanding for fetish.
~ source: Andy Rutledge

Andy Rutledge, you have no idea how much I agree with you.

I’d like to add that the design of this Journal was an experiment in design-porn. I found my past designs too austere. I felt it limited my ability to fully express what I wanted to convey. I must say that I haven’t quite reached a point where I’m satisfied with the amount of fluff in this design yet.

So get ready for more fluff (and a good culling afterwards)!

edit: Whoops, thanks Bob!

Design losing its effectiveness originally appeared on Candy by James on 15 December 2005.

A recent example of this is Cameron Moll’s recent article on A List Apart. I must note here that redefining wasn’t really the point of the article, but some (read: quite a lot of) people (mis)took it as such. In this article Cameron talks about re-alignment versus redesign of websites, explaining that an incremental approach to designing an existing site is quite a good thing. You can think of it as evolution versus revolution; the former might seem slower, but it does bring a lot more refinement than the latter.

Good advice right? Well I’d say so, but certain people got hung up on the use of re-align, saying it brought a new word with new buzz, thus creating confusion. People, get over it. New ways of using words to express ones ideas better are being created all the time. It’s the way language works. Just saying that restyling vs. redesign already means redesign vs. re-align is ridiculous. Redesign used to be a broad term, being used for little tweaks as well as full-blown new designs of an existing site. However, as time passed, redesign became synonymous with the full-blown new design of an existing site. The May 1st Reboot and CSS Reboot events have pretty much cemented this into the collective mind of the web (no I’m not going to say blogosphere..yuk!). Ironically, this slagging of re-align only increases it’s exposure as a buzzword so I really feel they’re shooting themselves in the foot. Others have different reasons for calling it harmful.

That same Anne (who I had the pleasure of meeting at the last Happy Clog meeting) mentioned in the a former post that xHTML has quite a number of downsides. As these include forward and backwards compatibility, they’re quite hefty. The upsides however seem to be zilch at present (excepting, maybe, search engine optimisation). HTML, on the other hand, seems to be getting a proper spec, written with the web in mind. I myself have half a mind to change over to HTML 5 once the spec’s finished. Note that this is simply a reconsidered position and has nothing to do with inflammatory dead horses.

Moving on to the curious post on SimpleBits about using ‘CSS patch’ instead of ‘CSS hack’ to get rid of the negative connotation that’s associated with the term ‘hack’ (even though it has noble beginnings, one can’t deny that due to server crackers being known hackers, hack has a negative meaning now). Thus it’s handy to use another term when you’re explaining your hacks to Pointy Haired Bosses. This doesn’t mean that CSS hacks should be endorsed or encouraged, in my eyes it’s still a last resort.

So do I disagree with everything in those twin-posts? Nah, Web 2.0 is just as meaningless as three (or was it four?) years ago. After seeing the OSCON keynote by Dick Hardt on Identity 2.0 I have some hope that server-side client-focussed (i.e. stuff requires nothing extra of the user but does make life easier for them) innovations like Identity 2.0 seems to be get as much attention as the client-side stuff (like remote JavaScript).

That’s another thing. JavaScript has become cool, nay, acceptable again! After the nightmare that was DHTML, we’ve now got a footballing cleansing acronym for ‘cool JavaScript stuff’ called AJAX. (Thanks Adaptive Path!) Even though they saw it as ‘a new approach to web applications’ it seems that everything connected to JavaScript has the tendency to over hype beyond belief. Compared to DHTML (Dynamic HTML) AJAX does have one saving grace. It provides a method of shoving more heavy lifting to the server-side where, in my mind, it belongs (certainly if the mobile web ever takes off).

So are there any buzzwords worth slagging hard? Absolutely.

On the slagging of buzzwords originally appeared on Candy by James on 2 November 2005.

[update: read how to do it vertically in: vertically centring in css (without hacks and multi-line enabled).]

The method I use is to have a wrapper div with the following css:

.wrapper {
position:relative;
margin:0 auto;
text-align:left;

width:whatever;
}

For good measure, you’ll need to apply the IE fix:
body { text-align:center; }
And yes indeed, the “text-align:left” of the wrapper makes sure the text aligns to the left again.

Now you’re free to absolutely position the content using the wrapper as reference point. This is due to the fact that an element with position:relative applied to it forces every element inside it (the so called child element) to use the parent as reference, not the viewport (the part of the browser in which a web page is displayed). You could say it resets the reference point of it’s children elements.

This means you can still use absolute positioning while centring the whole page, like so:

.content {
position: absolute;
left: whatever;
top: whatever;

width: whatever;
}

In this specific case, he needed a div to be placed over some Flash content. Good news: It works like a charm for positioning something over Flash!

So there you have it, cross browser centring of absolute & relative positioned divs working in modern browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera & Safari as well as the ye olde Internet Explorer. Hope this lil’ article has been useful to you.

On Horizontal CSS Centering using Absolute Positioning or how Relative Positioning can rock your css. originally appeared on Candy by James on 2 October 2005.