What’s new?

Another round of tinkering with wasabicube has revealed Version 6 – much less “Aussie” in appearance (no disrespect intended to our friends across the ditch who’re currently destroying us at cricket).

I’ve continued with part of the theme started in Version 5 and softened it a bit. Additionally, the photo pages have a new style with much less ridiculous hover behaviour than before. The previous hover onslaught was intended to remove most of the distractions from the image. When the mouse was hovered over the picture all the usual descriptions, thumbnails etc. would appear. There may well be merit in that approach but I need to refine it somewhat. This will have to do in the meantime.

Many moons after I first used Paul Sowden’s stylesheet changer, it’s back. So if you’re an Aussie or for any other reason, you can still view the site in its Version 5 guise using the button at the foot of the sidebar.

I’m working on an interesting new menu effect but it still needs some refinement to gracefully handle changing text sizes.

Books

As mentioned in the previous post Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag’s the Zen of CSS design has been added to my library. It’s an excellent book and covers so much more ground than I had expected (the joy of blindly* pre-ordering on-line!). Lots of good design ideas, from typography to color to layout, not just a list of ways to skin a cat [err, garden – Ed].

During the week I received a package by post containing a copy of Kevin Guilfoile’s first novel, Cast of Shadows, which I was lucky enough to win in a Limerick competition via Coudal Partners Infrequent Mail! Thank you guys, it’s proving to be a great read. Now, I just need to work out how to spend less time in front of the computer and more turning pages … I feel a holiday coming on!

SXSW Interactive

SXSW has concluded and sounds to have been another fantastic event this year. I have to admit to a degree of “developer envy” seeing the number of designers and developers, who have inspired me, making the journey. In fact, most of my Designer’s blogs list seems to have been in attendance this year. SXSW is firmly affixing itself on my list of things to do.

*Though it’s hardly blind given the authors’ credentials.