Recent blog posts

An frequent issue in web design is the fact that there are  a pretty huge number of browsers out there, all of which handle code “standards” in their own peculiar little way. Different operating systems offer different browsers, and somehow even ancient browsers like IE6 (10 years and still kicking!) are still a major players!

As You may understand, this causes a bit of a headache for people like me. Valid code is sometimes not enough to circumvent all quirks and bugs that exists – websites need to be tested. Setting up test environments for all possible operating systems browsers can be quite frustrating, but fortunately there are alternatives. Services like Browsershots have been around for a while, but they all suffer from the same problems – less than perfect rendering of pages, and they are awfully slow.

All except Adobe Browserlab. With Browserlab, Adobe provides an excellent service for testing webbrowsers. It may not be as good as the real thing, but the flexibility, speed and price (it’s free!) is really really hard to match!

I just recently stumbled upon the portfolio of canadian painter Nick Lepard. As it turns out, not only is Nick an excellent painter, but also a great guy. When asked about his painting The Event (on the left) he told me that it was sold out, but that he could send me a high resolution copy of the painting for me to print myself.

Unfortunately I haven’t gotten around to actually printing it yet, but I’ll be sure to post some updates when that happens.

One of the most annoying parts of designing for the web has, speaking for myself of course, always been building grid systems. Sure, the idea of floating elements is not really that hard to grasp, but laying out complex web pages can still offer quite a challenge. It’s not that the work is hard; it’s just hard work.

Despite that, it took me a while to understand the power of grid systems, such as 960.gs. Or rather, it took some time before I decided to try it out – after that I was sold pretty much on the get go. The concept is quite simple: you import a style sheet containing predefined classes, which allows you to deal with a simple 12 column grid instead of single pixels. Creating a simple two column layout is as simple as designating 4 columns for the sidebar and 8 columns for the content; widths, margins and floats are all taken care of by the system.

Also, as a special perk, templates are provided for most large design applications, which makes creating professional looking mockups a cakewalk. If you have yet to try 960gs – please do. I bet you won’t regret it!

3. 2. 1. Lift off!

I’m very proud to announce the new version of the Favela website! It’s been a few weeks of late nights, trying to squeeze this in between other projects, but I’m very happy with the outcome and I hope you like it too!

I’m pretty sure there still are a few quirks that need to be sorted out, so if you see something that looks out of place, please let me know!