New WordPress Theme: Sans–serif Racer

November 14th • 25 Comments • Under: Design Suggetions • Tags: Design, WordPress

While tweaking the Times Racer theme which is currently used in this blog, I was fascinated by how the sans-serif typeface and the aligned positioning of different elements made it look really harmonic and solid.

After hours of PHP, HTML and CSS trickery, the new theme was named Sans-serif Racer and ready for the release. It features unique border elements, light background shading and, similarly to Agneka Simple, one base color which can be easily adjusted. Read more »

Logos and Names Are Not <h1> Headings

November 13th • 1 Comment • Under: Design Suggetions, Understanding Web • Tags: code, Design, suggestion

It is a common trend among many web designers and developers to use h1 tag for a logo of a website. Although such decision has no impact on the visual presentation of the content, it drastically diminishes the semantic power of h1 tag.

Every page on the web can be viewed as a single document. Hypertext enables linking and organizing them into groups and sets, which requires that each document has a clear purpose and structure.

Domain names are unique identifiers of those different groups of documents and are the broadest description of their content. Therefore usually they already include the name of a business, person or product (I will refer to them as ‘logos’). Read more »

Features Of the Upcoming «Times Racer» WordPress Theme

November 8th • 22 Comments • Under: Design Suggetions • Tags: Design, WordPress

Times Racer is a WordPress theme which you can currently see on this blog. I have always thought that sans-serif typefaces (like Helvetica, Arial or Verdana) are the best for readability on the screen. However the increasing use of font anti-aliasing among different operating systems can be a good reason to reevaluate this assumption.

Breaking the rules that were once considered the only reasonable way of doing something is very hard, especially for designers. But it is also very mind-opening at the same time — to realize the unbounded beauty of the design choices and opportunities. Read more »

Agneka Simple — WordPress Theme

November 3rd • 17 Comments • Under: Design Suggetions • Tags: Design, WordPress

I have created a very simple and clean WordPress theme which uses only one base colour (which you can set), no images, fluid layout and doesn’t require any plugins.

It was built to illustrate the power of Konstruktors CSS snippets for creating grid based layouts. View screenshots and read more about Agneka Simple.

Good and Bad CSS Identifiers

October 17th • 4 Comments • Under: Design Suggetions • Tags: analysis, css, web design

Seeing a <div class="left green">...</div> block in HTML code might hurt the eyes of a lot of web designers. To identify good and bad id and class names, it is important to understand the idea of the CSS.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines CSS2 as:

a style sheet language that allows authors and users to attach style (e.g., fonts, spacing, and aural cues) to structured documents (e.g., HTML documents and XML applications). By separating the presentation style of documents from the content of documents, CSS2 simplifies Web authoring and site maintenance.

Therefore class names left, green or largetext are theoretically good according to the first part of the CSS definition, but very very bad according to the second part, which can be illustrated with the following example. Read more »