1. Fancy Form Design Using CSS
2. Prettier Accessible Forms
3. The Form Assembly – Form Layouts
4. Forms markup and CSS – Revisited
5. CSS-Only, Table-less Forms
6. CSS Styling of forms
7. Semantic Horizontal Forms
8. Styling Form Fields
9. Clean and pure CSS FORM design
10. Showing Good Form
11. Styling form controls with CSS, revisited
12. Styling Form Fieldsets, Legends and Labels
13. Pretty Up Your Forms with CSS
14. Tableless forms
15. Who says CSS Forms Can’t Look Good?

Hope you find something that is worth redoing.

Sources:

• 51 Form Element Resources and Tutorials Using CSS And Javascript
• 40 CSS Web Form Style Tutorials For Web Developers

I came across a couple of websites recently that use the following CSS bits on dark body text

text-shadow: 0 1px 0 #fff;

or some such thing. Of course, sometimes including the vendor-specific extensions as well.

Please, don’t that. I pretty sure that it makes body text harder to read and I’m not quite sure whether it really looks that good. I mean, I haven’t got any scientific studies at hand and it somehow looks good in the beginning but once you try to read it, your eyes are complaining sooner or later. At least my eyes are.

I will conduct a non-representative study about this but until then: Please only use this effect for headlines. Please!

It was quite minimalistic and we only had one Mac user out of nine people attending the course. So, what they all agreed on was: “It’s good design but I don’t like it.”

Now, I’m not a Mac user and I still like the website. The attitude of Apple is tending to get on my nerves and I still like the website. They are somewhat confronting the web dev community with facts that are hard to swallow: App Store policies, no flash please, no Java please etc. and I still like the design of the website. What is more: I think that the Apple website is a perfect place to go if you need a quick example for [insert your favorite web design rule here].

But that’s not actually the point that I wanted to make here. What is the point, however, is that we had an epiphany when the sentence in the title of this post was uttered. There is a difference between taste and good design. If, of course, you are a designer then this is your daily bread. This is still not something that you get across to your students easily and I think this sentence will do exactly that.

As an extra for my course: Here’s how the last slide should have looked like…

Set in St Ryde Regular and Adelle Basic Bold

Update: I’ve put up the presentation on Slideshare.com:

Fluid Sculpture from Charlie Bucket on Vimeo.

Polaris by Miniature Rocket from Yaniv Fridman on Vimeo.

Experimental Tribute from Chris Carter on Vimeo.

Aspirins – Cutter from Mr. Harrison on Vimeo.

LCD Soundsystem “Home” from FUNWUNCE on Vimeo.

Auf jeden Fall ist es interessant die beiden Logos mal nebeneinander zu sehen:

Die Logos für den Energieversorger HSE (links) und für die Henningsdorfer Stahl Engineering GmbH

Sicherlich gibt es Unterschiede, aber der sehr ähnliche Charakter der beiden Entwürfe ist unverkennbar. Interessant ist auch, dass die beiden Abkürzungen identisch sind. Ich lasse die Interpretation des letzten Satzes einfach mal offen.

Aber was bedeutet das jetzt eigentlich? Wenn es einfach ein Versehen sein sollte, wovon ich stark ausgehe, dann ist es ein äußerst peinliches. Der Artikel in der FR weißt sehr süffisant darauf hin, dass man vor allem den Slogan „Das Ganze sehen“ leicht ergooglen kann. Offensichtlich ist also die Recherche-Arbeit bei diesem 400.000,- € Projekt etwas zu kurz gekommen, möchte man süffisant ergänzen. Ich will nicht wissen, wie da die Stimmung bei den Verantwortlichen ist.

It also made me think about Weebly.com itself, I mean, from the perspective of a web designer. So here are two lists: “What I love about Weebly” and “What I hate about Weebly”.

What I love about Weebly

• quick results that look nice
• you can concentrate on the content more
• no need to have a deep insight into HTML and CSS (which was the killer reason for most in my courses this semester to use it)
• no need to deal with HTML and CSS at all if you don’t want to
• it doesn’t need to be tweaked to get a ‘normal’ website, like you would tweak WordPress (you know, get rid of the calendar, the comments on each page and so on)
• you have a couple of options that would require some work to include it in an HTML document of your own (Google maps, YouTube videos, etc.)
• it’s free (and in most cases you don’t need the pro features)

What I hate about Weebly

• invalid HTML (try validating a Weebly page… I mean, <font> in an XHTML 1.1 document? <style> within the <body>? Come on!)
• invalid CSS
• you can still do everything wrong concerning a clearly structured layout
• no need to deal with HTML and CSS at all if you don’t want to
• the fact that you can include so many different (multimedia) elements leads to the fact that they are often used in abundance, i.e. too often
• using Weebly is not a guarantee to create a usable and well designed website

It might seem a bit harsh to only pick up Weebly and thrash it like this, however, I will do the same with other website generators with a focus on websites and not so much on blogs or wikis (like webs.com, which also has a free option, or squarespace.com, which doesn’t have a free option) in some of the next courses. If you have any suggestion which generators I should have a look at, please feel free to write a comment.

So far the shop offers three products and nine colors altogether. The shop offers a couple of designs already and some more will follow from time to time.

Ah, yes… The designs is are open to interpretation, of course, and they are available for women and men in various colors.

Why is it, I ask myself, that almost all of them are designed in such a way that it is almost impossible to read the toolbar?

Have a look at some screen-shots and you will know what I mean.

This can only lead to one of two (or both) conclusions:

Either designers are not aware whatsoever that there might be writing on their images (which I doubt) or they assume that no one reads what is written in the toolbar anyway (which I doubt also). What is more is that the browser viewport gets a competitor because the use of flashy colors leads to a massive distraction. Don’t you learn that frames should be unobtrusive? I think that it’s a nice idea but once again, it leads to a number of results that you wouldn’t wish for.

I know what you want to say. “Stop being a troll, stop being grumpy about it, you don’t need to use it.” And yeah, you are absolutely right.

Comments (especially nice ones) are very much appreciated.

(Oh my, now I know a lot more about WordPress than I did before )