For those of you who are visiting using IE7, please excuse the mess. You may notice an annoying bit of breakage of the design in the lower section of the page. I apologize for the distraction and intend to give it proper attention just as soon as I can. Client work has me quite busy at the moment, but as soon as I have a little bit of breathing room I’ll fix it. I knew this day would come eventually. A conditional word of advice:

<!––[If IE]>
might want to consider switching to Firefox
<![endif]––>

If you’ve ever noticed (or been annoyed) that IE/Win sometimes seems to do undesirable things to the positioning of background images, you are not alone. I often use background images to help spice up the appearance of an unordered list or to draw attention to it, and am constantly reminded of the fact that sometimes IE/Win just doesn’t play nice. Thankfully, it turns out that there is a really easy workaround. In the following example we’ll apply a background image (16×16_pink_circle.gif) to each of the three list items in an unordered list. (more…)

I just finished reading another great… no, scratch that… outstanding book on the topic of standards based web design. The book, Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm, is another must read for those of you who are interested in designing with web standards in mind. In a nutshell, this book takes a look at some common solutions to many specific web design problems, breaks them down to expose any shortcoming(s), and then demonstrates an alternative (or as Dan says, “Bulletproof”) solution which is much more robust. This book was a total eye opener for me. It’s very nicely layed out, very well written and illustrated, and Dan’s writing style makes for easy and entertaining reading. It was nearly impossible for me to put down and I imagine that just about anyone, whether just starting out, or well seasoned in web page design with XHTML & CSS, would really enjoy and benefit from reading it. Wholeheartedly recommended!

To celebrate my totally awesome wife and my 1st wedding anniversary, we decided to spend several days at the Four Seasons Resort Lanai at Manele Bay. The raw beauty of the island is breathtaking and the resort is unbelievable. One of the highlights of the trip for me was chill’in out by the pool with the Zen of CSS design (pictured right) which is an outstanding book by Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag. Very well written, nicely illustrated, engaging, insightful, inspirational and entertaining, I found it difficult to put the book down.

A quick tangent… Molly is an incredible proponent and evangelist for web standards. I had the great pleasure of meeting her and listening to her speak about standards based design a couple of summers ago at a two day seminar hosted by Pacific New Media at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I highly recommend attending an event where she will be speaking if you can. (more…)

If you are in the Honolulu, Hawaii area and enjoy pushing pixels (and vectors for that matter) around with Photoshop CS2 as much as I do, you might be interested to know that Scott Kelby is going to be holding an all day seminar at the Hawaii Convention Center on December 4th, 2006. For those of you who are not familiar with Scott Kelby, he is the author of several outstanding series of very popular Photoshop how-to books. I’ve tremendously enjoyed the Photoshop Down & Dirty Tricks series he has written over the years and I understand that he is a phenomenal teacher in person. I’m looking forward to the day of pixel pushing adventures!

No, don’t worry, your monitor is not playing tricks on you - the site is different. Yep, I finally got inspired and completed a much needed redesign. The dark grays and earthtones of version 10 (pictured right for nostalgic purposes) were rich, warm, and dramatic, but I really felt that it was time to brighten things up around here. So, it’s out with the old and in with the blue… I am pleased to announce version 11 of the site (it’s hard to believe that this is the 11th major redesign). Other than the new look and feel of things, not a great deal has changed with the v_11 redesign. (more…)