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CSS3 carn’t be out for a few years?
First off before I get any haters getting on my case about this post, it is just my opinion regarding CSS3 and why it can’t be released for a few more years yet.
I was sat at work last week and we had a discussion about css3 and when we think it would be ready to use and why. I came up with the answer at least a few more years yet. The reason why I say this is IE6. I have heard some people saying that IE6 will be fazed out at the end of the year or should be dropped soon as IE8 gets a public release.
Yes I agree and fully support that IE6 should be dropped when IE8 gets a public release in an ideal world but nothing ever works out this way. I work at a small design agency and we work with local clients (as well as national clients) and sadly they are not always Internet savvy and don’t care what they use to get on the Internet, and they use… you guessed it IE6. I do not know what other agencies clients use and it will differ from agency to agency.
I am with the idea that we need to progress as a medium and get IE6 finished as a browser but this realistically is not going to happen for a few more years yet. I support people like 37signals, Bryan Veloso and others not supporting IE6. Even I don’t support IE6 fully on this blog, but until the client base is round about 10% we can not drop the support.
The main reason that I can see why people have not migrated to IE7 and above is Vista. Vista is not that bad, yes it is a hog on resources but it works well. But Vista was not/is worth upgrading. It was not the leap that people expected. It was not the 98 to xp.
If Vista was a amazing product I could see IE6 nearly dead but it wasn’t so we have to live with it…
Now you might be wondering what has IE6 and the IE6 bashing got to do with CSS3? Well if you think of it IE6 and IE7 (not sure with IE8 yet) wont be able to support CSS3. SO I can see the people at the w3c having to wait to IE can support CSS3 features like Mozilla, Safari and Opera and then we might see it slowly come out.
If CSS3 was to roll out next week the designers in us will want to use them in our projects and push the boat out. Some clients will want the features of this and then when they log on in IE they will be like “why is this not working?” they would have paid good money and expect it to work in all browsers. So If CSS3 was released it would lead to anarchy on the Internet. We would basically have two make to websites for some clients.
But we will be waiting a few more years still until IE6 can be buried with good old Netscape.
Please let me know your thoughts on this matter, and as I stated this is just my own personal thought regarding css3.
Been Busy
Sorry for the lack of updates here on the notebook I have been really busy over the last week and a half.
I am now back to full health after getting tonsillitis and then an ear infection, took a while to get the hearing back in right ear and still feel loss and build up of pressure now and again (but that’s to be expected).
I did plan on writing some good posts every few days and that’s something that I intend to do but it wont be for a few weeks yet.
Work wise at the agency I work for things have been going brilliant, settled in there nicely now and I have been working on template systems for the in-house CMS and Shopping cart. Never doing a CMS before seemed daunting but I have got over it and all is well in the world.
Freelance work I have decided to stop taking on work as I do not want to cause a conflict of interest between my employer. I still may take on the odd project here and there but I will run it past my employer before giving the final nod.
Also I have a few pieces of work to add to the site so check back now and again and they should be up. Hopefully by next week.
The biggest news is that I have an idea for some interviews that I would like to do with a few designers about how they started out becoming a designer and why they wanted to.
Finally I have been looking in to Expression Engine as a CMS to use in the future, I did plan on Wordpress but the functionality and features of EE has won me over. I have a personal project in the works for a few months down the line that I am looking forward too.
Design decisions for my logo
After yesterdays post and still not being well enough to go to work I decided to write a new post on how I came up with the logo that you see here on this site.
This logo is the second version that I made for the portfolio. The first one people did not get and fully understand and that made the logo fail as a whole. To me logos have to be recognizable in all aspects from black and white to full colour and then to just outlines.
Here is the logo that I started off to use on the site.
A little information about the logo, I made this logo concept when sitting in classroom when I was about fourteen. Even before I knew what graphic design was. I was just interested in wasting time away in the class. It was a play on my Surname Downie. It is a capital E going down in to a arrowhead and that shows Down and E. Rather clever for a fourteen year old if I must say so. But as I said it was not working as a logo in the end run.
I knew that for this site I had to change it to something simple but at the same time unique. I decided on using typeface with a little difference. All will be revealed in a moment.
First I had to decided on a font that was complementary to the design but at the same time different. I made a typesheet in Adobe Illustrator of the fonts that I decided that worked for the design and then printed them out.
Here is the top of the typesheet that I printed out.
I then narrowed the typeface down to three choices these where Akzidenz Grotesk, Amplitude and Agenda. Notice how they all start with the letter a. It was by accident this happened but seems strange to me.
After much deliberation I decided to go with Akzidenz as the letter e was perfect for what I had in my mind to add something unique so that it was just more them a typeface.
I took the e out of the design and made my own styled to look like it was the same e. If you look at the e closely you can see it is my initials that make the letter e.
As you can see it adds something a little more unique then just a typeface. I hope that you enjoyed the post and if there is anything else that you would like to know just leave a comment.
My first year as a designer.
This is a post that I have decided to write even though it has not been a full year since I decided to be a designer. I have Tonsillitis at the moment so I am not able to do much more at the moment so it sparked me to write up this post.
This year has been eventful to say the least but I would have not changed anything what so ever.
It all started by getting let go (not sacked!) by a local carpet company in the village that I am from, and I was at an end on what to do. I did study Multimedia design at college a two years before (but never finished the course) and I always enjoyed looking at design and creating designs.
I started off by doing a few logo contents the site on sitepoint.com as at the time I found this the easiest way to make some money as I didn’t know any other way as I didn’t know how to code or design layouts at that time.
I started to get a few decent logos finished and some money so I put the logos on to a disk and go to some local design firms. I thing about the Village that I am from its very small I would have a say and say less than 1000 people live here but we have three design agencies.
After taking these to the agencies only one got back to me and asked if I do websites. Erm I can was my response and I asked for a dummy brief to design around for them. I designed two layouts, one was very image heavy and it was the better of the two. The other design was nothing but plain crap to be honest but I thought it would have been easier for them to code.
Never designing a layout before I made the assumption that it would be easy like designing a poster or a logo, when in fact it’s a different kind of monster. But I was not offered the job, but it sparked something that lead me to say I want to be a website designer. So I went to the nearest PC world (Lancaster btw) and purchased The Principles of beautiful web design by Jason Bierd for sitepoint.com and that became a bible for me for a few weeks.
I knew that wanting to become a Website Designer I had to learn how to code XHTML and CSS, not being a technical person myself I found it hard at first for the first few weeks/months but I kept reading.
However things took a change when I came across a post on a forum about someone wanting some graphic work doing and the position was to work from home. I applied for it and got it so I was now working from home but it was not doing website designs (that is what I wanted but I needed money). It was doing Logos, Website Buttons, Banners etc but at least it paid the bills for me.
I used the money for normal things like going out, Socializing, Clothes and Rent but I also made sure that I bought a design/development book every three weeks. By the time I finished I had :
- Logo and Letterhead Design 8 and 9.
- Making and breaking the Grid.
- The Zen of CSS Design.
- The art and science of css.
- Bulletproof webdesign
- CSS Mastery
- Transending CSS, The fine art of web design.
- Webstanderds creativity
- Pro CSS techniques.
After reading and studying all these books and lots of late night reading of blogs and communities. I understood a fair amount XHTML and CSS, enough to code a website. Then to my surprise I got an email of Paul Boag from Boag World, the podcast that I listened too saying that I had won the competition to go down to Brighton and be part of Andy Budd’s CSS Mastery workshop. Inspiring was the only word that I could think to describe the Workshop. I met many people like minded and I have kept in contact with a few of them. Andy’s Workshop ironed out all the little questions that I had with left with CSS and I go that AHHA moment when the little things clicked.
I then decided to call it a day with my employer as a mutual agreement as I was not happy then working there with the direction and went out on my own. This now seems to be the best decision of the lot as it gave me the time to build my portfolio.
The site that you see now is the labour of that time. It was the fifth layout that I did and the first one I full coded and designed all the pages for. I was quite happy with the site that I put together, and the response off the community was good.
I now see little areas that I will fix up over time.
I had a good stream of work coming in and requests for quotes and I would have been happy working here for myself. But I noticed that the agency that I applied for was looking to hire again and by the off chance I sent them an email to say I would be interested. The next day I was asked if I can come down for an interview. And a day later I was offered the job.
I really like working for an agency and I think that is the right time in my life to do so. The agency gives me the tools and area to grow and learn my trade more so then I could at home as there are four of us in the same room and critiques and help is always there if I need it. We all like the same things and get along so that really helps. Also working on projects that I don’t pick myself keeps me fresh as it removes me out of my zone and that’s a good thing.
So the first year (well almost a year) has probably been the happiest year of my life to date, and the design community is really open to anyone.
One thing to say to people wanting to get in to design is that read and experiment as much as you can, be prepared to lose many hours in front of the computer and books. And you can never stop learning.
I hope that this post made sense as I am not the best at writing (that’s why I am not a copywriter).
Featured on.
I would like to say thank you for the sites and CSS galleries that have featured http://www.ryandownie.com without getting featured on these I would have not received some of the credit i have received. So thank you.
As well as many many more…
The Blog is a go and a very quick update.
Just a very quick update is that the Blog is a go. I have had to outsource the wordpress coding to a very capable developer called Muhammad Haris, as I do not know the wordpress template structure yet.
A lot has happened since I launched the site. I have been featured on numerous CSS showcases and I am very thankful for this. I will be writing a post about this pretty soon.
I have also been hired by a local design agency and I am learning new things every day and I love every minute of it.
There have been a few more projects that have been completed since that last update and I will work on adding them in the next couple of days.
