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Graphic Design & Layout
Response to “In Defense of Vertical Navigation”
By Louis Lazaris on January 12th, 2010
Categories: Graphic Design & Layout, Web Design Articles | 7 Comments >
It’s been quite a start to this week since the publication of my article on Smashing Magazine called The Case Against Vertical Navigation. I really didn’t expect this type of response. I assumed that what I was stating was a fairly commonly held view among designers.
Since there have been a lot of criticisms of Smashing Magazine over the past year (mainly because of endless “list” posts), Vitaly Friedman was more than happy to publish an opinion piece on a specific aspect of design. So, if you haven’t read the original article yet, please do. And please read Kyle Meyer’s response to my article, which I will be responding to here.
I’m glad Kyle posted his response; as Jacob Gube mentioned in both SM’s comments and on Kyle’s site, this type of discussion is good, regardless of who is right and wrong.
Impressive Webs Redesign
By Louis Lazaris on November 30th, 2009
Categories: Graphic Design & Layout, Web Design Articles | 8 Comments >
Over the weekend I rolled out a new “skin” for Impressive Webs, which I think improves the site’s design quite a bit. There’s more contrast, which creates a more distinct experience. And I finally have a logo that I’m satisfied with.
The layout of the site remains virtually the same, so, like I said, it’s not as much of a redesign as a “skinning”. I did change the height of the top navigation bar, and added some new graphics.
Will EOT Become the Standard for Font Embedding?
By Louis Lazaris on October 21st, 2009
Categories: Graphic Design & Layout, Web Standards & Best Practices | 5 Comments >
If you’re at all familiar with the various methods in use today to embed custom fonts in web pages (sIFR, Cufon, @font-face, etc), then you also may have heard of a font format called EOT. Well, if Microsoft has it their way, EOT will become the standard, allowing web developers — with permission from font vendors — to be free to use virtually any font in a text-friendly manner in their web pages.
So what is EOT, and how has Microsoft pushed to standardize this method? Embedded OpenType fonts are compact OpenType fonts designed by Microsoft for use as embedded web fonts. They are recognizable by their “.eot” file extension. By means of data compression and removal of superfluous data, EOT files are made small in size and include features that protect the fonts themselves from being copied and used in unauthorized ways.
10 WordPress Tips to Make Your Blog Look Like a Website (for Beginners)
By Louis Lazaris on May 25th, 2009
Categories: Graphic Design & Layout, Web Design Articles | 31 Comments >
Whatever industry you happen to be in, you want to stand out from the crowd and be unique, and not give the impression that your online presence is just a slightly modified cut and paste job. Of course, if you’re depending on a pre-built content management framework like WordPress for the core of your blog [...]
New Features of Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 (CS4 Webcast)
By Louis Lazaris on September 24th, 2008
Categories: Graphic Design & Layout | No Comments >
Tuesday morning, Adobe followed through on a webcast that was alerted via email subscribers informing previous Adobe software customers of the newest release of Adobe Creative Suite, specifically CS4. The graphic designers and front end developers at the company I currently work for got together to watch the web cast. Here is my summary:
It was [...]
Easy Equal Columns with CSS
By Louis Lazaris on August 7th, 2008
Categories: Graphic Design & Layout, Markup & Style | 4 Comments >
In a previous article I described (in principle) a method using JavaScript to get equal columns in a two-column layout. Of course, that’s not always the most elegant solution. Another solution, which is much easier to implement is completely CSS based. I’ll describe briefly how this is done and what possible effects it could have on your site’s layout and code. Here is the demo page, if you want to jump ahead.
Equal Column Height Using JavaScript
By Louis Lazaris on May 29th, 2008
Categories: Graphic Design & Layout, Markup & Style, Scripting | 1 Comment >
I’m currently working on a project that requires that I use either some very tricky CSS or else JavaScript to make a left column div expand automatically to fit its parent container. The parent container and left hand nav appear on multiple pages, and there is different content, including that which is dynamically generated, so I cannot just add a height to both elements in the CSS.
