Archive

* html body {display: none;} … I haven’t figured out why some think this hack is discriminatingGeorg

position: relativity

Ever wonder why applying a position: relative to an element in Internet Explorer can fix bizarre rendering problems? The standing theory, which is also a highly technical one, is that sometimes you just need to remind IE that things need to flow in their natural order. As logical as that may sound, the problem really has to do with a little thing called hasLayout.

display: none inline-block

This is not a new cat, nor a new bag, for that matter. Web designers have long been plagued with the rendering inconsistencies offered up by Internet Explorer, such as the peek-a-boo bug. Each of us, individually and as a community, have mapped these inconsistencies out and made record of them in our own bag of CSS tricks. None-the-less, IE still proves to be the most loathsome part of the job for many.

Though IE7 has made some pleasing improvements over it’s predecessors, it’s still a pitch or seven away from being adequate. So, I was very excited when I found On Having Layout, an on going project focussed on understanding IE’s proprietary “Layout” property and how it is messing up our world.

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Earlier this month I posted a short Photoshop tutorial about the ever changing header on this site. It’s a quip study into the nature of evolutionary branding, from an absurdist’s point of view - in my opinion, the backbone for viral marketing. The tutorial was not designed to actually help anyone who wants to learn Photoshop, so much as it was to manhandle this message.

This morning, however, I woke to find this lovely message in my inbox:

Hello Jeremy,I’m Julia Agnes from Tutorial Kit.There are some nice tutorials on your Repeatpenguin.com website, so we dared to create your author account at Tutorial kit and submit it (www.tutorialkit.com)…I hope you won’t mind listing your tutorial at Tutorial Kit. Please let me know what you think about that.

So I had to check and there it was.

Is the virus spreading? It’s a brilliant tactic in viral marketing, if I don’t say so myself. A tutorial teaching others to create your logo. Spread virus, spread. I can’t help but wonder if there might just be one kid out there, making a ‘penguin’ turkey card for Grandma this Thanksgiving.

Bon-Appétit:repeat

There is one common and fundamental key to good user experience, the user should never have to guess. This becomes even more important when you are asking the user to divulge personal information by creating a user account. A few months ago, I wrote an article on the importance of branding and design for registration forms. For an industry growing around web applications, user interaction has taken on a new role. Those points of interaction within a website, the programming and scientific elements have also taken a new role. In essence, this challenges the user. As a user interface designer, I want to reduce that challenge and make the experience as seamless and direct as possible.

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