Elemental. The quintessential English fellow, explorer, scientist, exotic dancer and some might say raving lunatic.

Moog teamed up with Elemental after he was lured into his laboratory under the promise of laudanum.

The laudanum never appeared.
This video however, did.

There are times when you wish there was a clean, elegant way to go about a thing and there are times, as we all know, when this just isn’t possible. Such, is my state of mind at present. We all know what it’s like to take something that is beautiful and clean, and have to bend and contort it to work in environments it really shouldn’t be subjected to. Such is the peril of the web designer and developer. And such is the profound necessity of standards.

In times like this, I can’t help but wish we, as designers and developers, had something for our practice, akin to the good old tennis ball hack.

Without a doubt, I’m ranting about Internet Explorer. I know, it’s a tiresome subject, but we, nevertheless, exhaust countless, valuable hours contending with the legacy Microsoft left behind.

I won’t blame Microsoft, entirely, for the recent neglect I’ve shown this blog. I’ve been buried in the final preparations, for the launch of the colossal project I’ve been working on for the past months. At the end of this stretch, starting in October of last year, and after roughly a dozen meetings and 160 odd, independent email strings, I think it’s understandable how spending the last 5 hours and 15 minutes trying to figure out why Internet Explorer would not except ‘click’ events and in the end discovering a simple switch to a ‘mousedown’ event worked fine, had me little feathers, a wee bit ruffled.

Don’t get me wrong, I was ready to cry like a little girl when I happened upon this senseless solution, but I’m not the type to easily let things go, not understood. So is life with IE.

The funny thing in all this, is I couldn’t stop thinking about the brilliance of the tennis ball hack and how wonderful it would be for us developers facing off with Internet Explorer, if we had a similar, beautiful solution to IE short comings. The fact, however, is that we are the tennis balls to the IE walker, in this equation.

Unlike our gainful pursuits in web standards, the tennis ball hack has not enjoyed the same glint on the horizon. In fact, rather than improve the design of the walker, as to not require the cannibalized tennis ball, companies have bloomed to capitalize on this age old hack and take something away from the masses and a stab at the beauty of accessibility.

Alas, the parallels with Internet Explorer and the web design community are uncanny. I digress. It’s a beautiful, chilly day in San Francisco and I am off to try to catch the end of Preemptive Media’s presentation on Air, at Southern Exposure. Enjoy the weekend, and if you have a chance, pick up a can of tennis balls just for fun. You never know when you might need to erase black scuff marks from the tile or rescue your keys from inside your locked car.

Delivering under tight deadlines is pretty much what you’re in for, if you’re a web designer. Knowing how to handle it, is what will make you a designer of the web. As many times as I’ve wanted to pull my hair out with unrealistic deadlines and “last minutes”, I also get my adrenaline fix out of it (not that I care to share this with clients ~ these are invisible pixels). I’m guessing, if you’re a web designer, you’re with me on this (don’t worry, you don’t have to admit it out loud).

Well, being as much a junkie as the next developer, I’m the first to to admit there is a limit. So here are some simple tips for how to manage your time so that the next time you get that “I needed it yesterday” call, you can calmly deliver in 3 days (seriously, nothing takes less than 3 days, whatever the task). When all is said and done, your 1 hour rush project is going to occupy you to some degree, over the next 3 days. Accept this. Plan for it. It will make your life less stressful.

That being said, a 3 day rush is almost unheard of. You’re probably looking at something that will take 2 or 3 weeks at least. So what can you do to help reduce the time you need to spend and squeeze this extra project into your schedule (and produce something that doesn’t suck)?

topside down

The war was on. Time was short. And on May 6, 1918 Congress set the rate for air mail postage at 24¢. In a mad rush to beat the inaugural flight on May 15, the fine artists at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing produced the finest example of rushed product ever. But don’t think you’ll be so lucky. In fact, the USPS was frantically trying to reacquire the 100 out 2 million air postage stamps that went out inverted. Turned out to be one the most lucrative mistakes ever.

So, you may have noticed the changing logo in the header. It’s not entirely related to this post. It’s an ongoing project I starting when I first published repeatPenguin. Though making time for it is at the very least, challenging, the idea is to continuously add to the header logo throughout the year. I’m keeping a record of the variances in the graveyard.

the seat of one’s pants

That’s not the way things work for web designers. Mistakes are generally considered bad. You can’t avoid them entirely, but if you cut the fat out of your process, you’ll have that extra few moments to QA, and that can be the one thing that lets you hold tight to your sanity.

Systems will save you. I still struggle with this every day. The hardest thing in web design is managing. Prior to starting my own design firm, I was fortunate enough to work in variety of outfits, from design lackey to creative consultant to managing my own team of designers. Each place I worked, I learned something new, got a little bit more proficient. That said, I still find myself flying by the seat of my pants nearly every day.

The tricks that have helped me a great deal fall into 2 categories. The first being organization.

Having systems in place will earn you your wings. Have a system. From naming files, storing files and managing time lines.

These tasks should be wrote. You don’t want to waste your time looking for emails, hunting for files or saving out file versions. There are loads of tools out there to help you. Personally, my life depends on two. First, Office Time and Gmail. Between the two, I can track my hours (very important) with the click of the mouse and find all my correspondences. Throw in Google Calendar and you’ve got the basis for a business.

The second category could be labeled quite simply “don’t reinvent the wheel.” This is where we can talk about frameworks. I’m not talking about prefab templates. I’ve never found them very useful and if your goal is to become a stronger designer/developer, I don’t think they are very helpful. Rather than templates, I’m talking about usable frameworks. We’ve all seen frameworks for Javascript, PHP, Java and so forth. They are designed to serve as a set of tools and libraries to assist in conventional tasks. If you apply this thinking to CSS, you can save yourself a lot of work.

Every project I’ve worked on, there are basic style sets in common. I have always preferred keeping all my CSS in one document, thus limiting server hits and giving myself a visual cascade I can see all at once. Clearly commenting your styles and using a standard naming convention goes a long way.

if it floats (your boat)

Stick to what works for you. In the midst of writing this article, I came across this brilliant article by Jeff Croft on ALA. Go figure. But he hits on some great points on this topic, if you want to pros and cons. Me, I’ve found a single CSS file with clearly marked code works best. I have a core framework CSS files, that zeros out all the browser defaults and sets up all of my globals and typical architectural classes. This is just a framework, I haven’t actually applied style to any of it. This step gives you a leap into the next project. You can start with something clean and organized, right off the bat.

Life under fire has been getting the best of me lately. If there’s one thing I learned doing web design, is that you have to be able to deliver your best under pressure. And more importantly, you have to know how and when to still make time for yourself. I wouldn’t think about complaining about too much work. It’s the best thing a designer could ever want. But when it comes down to it, sanity is more important. On top of that, if you work with the person you’re dating, it becomes all the more important. This is why I’m starting a series on keeping sane, in web design.

Oddly enough, one of the things that helps me is surfing the web. I know. Last thing most designers would want to spend their down time on. So, I’m starting things off with a few notable finds.

Clean CSS

Clean CSS is a powerful CSS optimizer. It works by taking your CSS code and making it cleaner and more concise. It works by automatically merging same CSS selectors and properties and returning clean, well-formatted code. It’s not a validator, but it works surprisingly well.

Typetester

The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. Its’ primary role is to make web designer’s life easier. They keep their database up-to-date. It’s a great little tool.

cl1p

Every wish you could Copy something on one computer and Paste it on another? cl1p allows you to do just that. Copy and paste from one computer to another. It’s a pretty simple concept and I love it.

what’s special about this number

This is for the geek in me. What’s special about numbers, is all about numbers. ‘Nough said.

This morning was very traumatic. After spending most of the night working, I got up at 6AM on a Sunday, to straighten up a bit before my house guests arrive. For those of you who don’t know, Lauren and I keep a pair of rats. Yes, “rats in the bathroom,” as Mark says. Their names are Abbi and Addi (we thought we’d make it challenging).

Part of my morning preparations was cleaning the poor girls cage, which I had sadly neglected for far too long. I scooped them out of their cage. Placed them in the usual medium sized box and proceeded, with the cage, to the patio to scrub a way. Obvious lack of judgment aside (in retrospect), I have to say, I’ve done this a hundred times and never had a problem. Not so, this morning.

The cage may have taken just a little bit longer to clean. Or maybe I was just moving a little bit slower than normal, but when I returned Abbi had managed to get out of the box and onto the floor. She must have been as startled as I was, because when I entered the room she bolted. Now, there wasn’t really anyplace for her to go, or so I thought, but she managed to find a tiny crevasse between the counter and the floor.

Okay, I told myself. This is not so bad. She’ll come out. But the fact was, I had no idea what was between the counter and the floor. To give you an idea, we live a very large redev warehouse, so no real telling what lies between walls.

To top it off, in my frazzled state of rattled nerves and lack of sleep, I came up with a brilliant plan to go to the kitchen and get some peanut butter to lure her out. Of course, I ran out leaving poor Addi alone in the open box. When I returned with said peanut butter, the little bugger had wedged herself between the brick wall, a 6×6 steel beam and a tight little drop of several “rat” mile to the floor.

By this point, all plans for my expected guests had gone completely out the window and at the hight of my brilliance, I was trying to rescue Addi from slipping into the dark abyss of the crevasse, by dangling a USB cable as a rescue line.

note to self: spend less time with computer and more time with rats.

the rescue

Some clever thinking, a small cardboard box, a pair of scissors and some masking tape later, both Abbi and Addi were recovered and are doing just fine and my frazzled nerves can rest.