Drupal musings 8: Styling the archive

I've been editing the basic html pages (as mentioned before on W2tQ) these include:

• Brian Hodges' introduction with a content listing and the scope of the model to help bridge theory and practice.
• My introduction to the model based on an interview with Brian conducted 28th May 1998 in Manchester, England.

I've been here before and lost the thread, working within Drupal. This time though editing the pages in Textmate, things are taking shape. Three headings, three fonts (currently) Georgia, Droid Serif, Tangerine; styled lists and striped tables. It might be basic, but there is a style sheet that is almost breathing as it INFLATES : deflates, the result of various experiments. The fonts look good except for the FOUT 'flash of unstyled text'. As the previous link shows there are some fixes for that - which I hope will follow in due course. That would be a distraction at this point though as there is much to focus upon. Although the archive will have a style of its own, other parts of the site must reflect its content. That said, there still needs to be some stylistic coherence. ...

Written in Padstow, Quayside Cottage listening to a children's show on the bandstand.

Drupal musings 7: HTML5, CSS3 ... & Mr Hodges meets Drupal

At Manchester airport in May I noticed Web Design Essentials (WDE). Reasons of cost £14.99 and weight meant it was put back on the news stand. The content was excellent! Back in the UK a week later, no sign of it in the supermarket. I found a copy this week at WH Smiths and made the 'investment' - a belated holiday treat.

This is gold mine of nuggets on HTML5, design - wireframes, user experience (UX), fonts and typography:

http://www.font-face.com/
http://fontdeck.com/

- personas, CSS3, jQuery and much more. Now I think about it UX has been around for quite a while, it's a sure sign of how web design has matured such that practitioners can and must focus on the experience. There's another blog post there contrasting UX in web design with UX in health services. Reading about the use of personas in design and planning for a site might also deserve a specific post. As WDE indicates there are companies dedicated to UX. I do not have that luxury and yet I do have to define my initial target audience and their anticipated experience.

The web design related listing I maintain at LINKS I (Intrapersonal) are being updated as a result of the leads in WDE.

Through the scheduling and poll services of Doodle (thanks Chris) and with the Drupal NW England list I'm checking on which day in the autumn - November - is best for a group of volunteers to help jump start the new site. Everything is sorted now for Drupalcon next month.

Box & Grid fonts plus Wicker People - blog banner.

As regular readers will be aware I've been after a decent banner for W2tQ.

I came across this site specialising in free fonts:

- and putting this resource together with a photo taken locally this is the result:


I do hope the Celtic influence does not scare anyone, but Hodges' model is a conceptual framework...