Design | Hen's Teeth Network Blog

Archive for the ‘Design’ Category

Web Safe Fonts and D.I.Y. Graphics, the perfect recipe.

Filed under: Design, How To — Boysen Hodgson on April 9, 2009

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You’re a D.I.Y. master, right? You’re building your own web page using tools that are readily available on the web for very little cost. Great. You’ve collected pictures, you’ve written text, you’ve even gotten out some markers and made sketches on a page. You know how many pages you want and how the navigation will work (check back for another post about effective navigation). Everything is going so well.

And then you start this new and strange process of ‘coding’ your web site. One of the things you notice immediately is that all the wonderful fonts that you want to work with don’t seem to be available. Web fonts and web typography are vastly different than traditional print typography. With the web you are not creating a static object that everyone will view the same way. You are actually creating a recipe. You are putting all the ingredients into small containers, writing all the instructions onto a page and then handing them off to someone else (or someone else’s web browser) to create your dish.

The web browser is the all powerful chef in the kitchen. What you intend to create can only be as palatable as the chef who makes it. And there are a bunch of chefs out there. (more…)

Moving Past Internet Explorer 6

Filed under: Design, This & That — Art Zemon on March 9, 2009

Internet Explorer 6 was one of the most costly mistakes that Microsoft ever made. I say “costly” because making web sites look right in IE6 and in other browsers has cost virtually everybody who owns a web site significant money because IE6 works so differently than all other browsers. Internet Explorer 6 even works differently than Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8!

In today’s economy, even more so than has previously been true, it is critical to focus your web site development dollars in areas which make a positive difference for your customers and clients. Rather than spending money making your site look “right” in IE6, it simply makes good sense to encourage people to replace IE6.

We have inserted code into our own web sites which displays a warning like the green box you see here to anyone using IE6. We are also beginning to insert this code into our clients’ sites because, 2 1/2 years after IE7 was released, it is time to move past IE6.

Sample Internet Explorer 6 warning message

Feel free to snag the code off of this page and use it on your own site or ask us to install it for you.

Going for Gold in Web Design

Filed under: Design — Tags: 1:1.618, DaVinci, fibonacci, golden section, leCorbusier — Boysen Hodgson on February 17, 2009

The angles of growth on the head of a sunflower are expressed through the angles of the Golden Ratio.

… the Golden Section that is. If you have never encountered this concept in the past, you have certainly seen it in action. The Golden Section is a ratio (specifically 1 : 1.61803398874989) that has deep roots in math [the Fibonacci sequence], art and nature. It is a naturally recurring pattern – nearly everywhere. From the chambers in a chambered nautilus to the pattern of seeds on the head of a sunflower to the way that corn forms on a corn cob, or the way a pine cone grows. It is also called the Divine Proportion. DaVinci used it on the Last Supper, le Corbusier used it as the basic proportion for many of his most famous buildings, the Parthenon and the Great Pyramids use the ratio to attain balance and pleasing, stable structure.

Since very early in the history of human thought and language, the golden section has been used to create designs that are balanced and naturally pleasing to the human eye. You have seen these patterns … but may not have known about the underlying structure that informs the design. The ratio creates a spiral pattern when mapped over itself – and this spiral is common in nature. So what does this have to do with web design? Though it may seem counterintuitive, using a natural ratio as the foundation for a web grid structure makes good sense. (more…)