sugarenia.com

Oh, the colours.

Oh, the pretty colours swirling in there.

I’m a sucker for well blended colours and robust palettes, and this portfolio (it’s my guess) site sports such a refreshing colour scheme you can almost smell it:

I’m not a big fan of the hugeness of the subtitle (for example, the project names? I could do with less font-size) but the overall feeling of the sight is light and crisp and fresh.

I wish I could mix colours like that.

colour, palette, josep sanou

Here’s a post that’s actually a well-hidden designers’ poll.
You people, coding your beautiful CSS out there, what is your style?

Single-line or multi-line?

I tend to use multi-line all the time because of work, but never cease to consider it a huge waste of space and bytes. It’s easier to tell apart the different rule properties, but you pay for it with scroll, scroll, scroll.

Single-line on the other hand makes shorter and sweeter CSS, but it’s more difficult to tell apart the different properties. On a positive note though, it’s really easy to scan through the file and find the rule you want, always a plus.

So it’s a tie? Who’s winning? What do you use?

P.S. Do not forget! For those out there working on Textmate (or having access to it anyway), there’s this great script from Dan Rubin that converts your single-lines to multi-lines in a sec, using the powers of regexp!

css, multi-line, single-line

Ah, Fridays, Fridays. Home of all things pricey food, cheap quality. Everything a true glutton wants and more.

Why a company would go with a life-metaphor site is beyond me. Fridays.gr is an awesome red, cartoonish creation that tries to accomplish the drive-in look - the fact that drive-ins don’t even exist in Greece never crossed the advertiser’s mind.

In front of the Illustrator-made screen there are parked cars, on hovering them with the mouse you can see them moving, you think hey, they want to be clicked! You click, nothing happens.

You hover the screen, it flashes up, maybe it wants to be clicked? You click, nothing happens.

When you manage to find a proper clickable area, you have to wait again for the new page to load, the screen to come closer, the clouds gather again up there. *yawn*

Getting to a page with actual content, you find out that it can be scrolled up and down with a custom, Flash gem of a scroller. Classy.

Aaaaaaand that’s the “Your opinion matters” poll. Bonus points to everyone that actually manages to fill in the damn thing.

And it’s all made in Flash, of course. It took a little over two minutes to load. No, really.

Anyone want gyros? It’s on me.

fridays, fridays.gr, wgss

Panic announced the 1.5 version of Coda yesterday, making a (kinda) huge leap from 1.1. The new version is full of good stuff for your favourite sexy powerhouse editor, including:

• Built-in version control. Yeah, you read that right. Commit, update and checkout to your heart’s content, all through Coda.
• Local multi-file search & replace. Amen.
• Custom books. Now you can add your own resources, complete with book cover image and all.
• Improved clips. You can now organize your clips in groups, as well as import and export them.
• You can now identify between local and remote copies of the same file at a glance, using the relevant icons.
• The almighty Sites are now sortable.
• A new action has been added, named “Reverse publish”, which allows you to download remote files to your local copy.

After hours I managed to set up version control with Coda, but mainly because I never sat down to do it properly, plus I had some permissions issues (as always).

The changes Coda 1.5 brings are all more than welcome, refreshing my idea of it quite a bit. Go Panic!

coda, panic, coda 1.5

It’s quite a long time that I’ve read Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman, Jr., but I never managed to write a proper review for this little gem of web design books. I think now is the time for proper credit.

DtO is a very pleasant and easy to read and use web design book, while at the same time is tons useful. The writing is simple and very pleasant, enriched with proper screenshots and relative images to avoid eye strain. The very size of the book is quite small - it’s not meant to be a bible, more of a handbook full of good advice.

It explores real-life web applications and sites to give you solid advice on information architecture, feature creep and simplicity in design. The book is relatively new and the examples are very current - so no stress there.

The author also establishes what I like to call the GTD methodology of design, calling it 5S. The 5S stands for five Japanese words starting from S, which are… Uhm, I think I shouldn’t spoil your fun.

What I really enjoyed were the Interface Surgery sections, where real-life problems met their solutions in a deductive way. Very useful indeed.

All in all, it’s a no-nonsense book that does everything that’s supposed to - and maybe a little more. I think it deserves a place somewhere in your web design / development shelf. It’s well worth its money.

designing the obvious, robert hoekman jr