Work Detail

books for books

File Under - websites

Project Information

Client:

Books for Books

Employer/Contractor:

Unreal Marketing

My Responsibilities:

All design prep., front-end coding, minor design

Tech:

XHTML, CSS, Javascript

Date:

December 15, 2006

When I began building Books for Books I had just come back from An Event Apart in Philly and I was all excited to try out some new things. One of the interesting (and surprising) things I heard from Eric Meyer was that it is ok to use tables sometimes. Wow, that blew my mind. After thinking about it for a bit I realized Eric was right. In some cases the mark-up is greater to try and achieve the "look" or functionality of a table than it is to just use a table.

Sorry, back to Books for Books. This was probably the single largest Photoshop file I ever worked with for a site. There were a lot of styles and a lot of functionality we wanted to achieve with the project. I decided on a fluid layout with a fixed max-width and I also wanted to make sure that the main content always showed up first. The client (and myself) liked the idea of the site working on blackberry's, etc. but we wanted to make sure you would not have to scroll through all of the left side content before getting to the main section of the site. This was achieved with some absolute and relative positioning magic and some good planning. Since the design called for many rounded corners and the layout was fluid I used Alessandro Fulciniti's "Nifty Corners" technique to achieve the effect.

In the end I handed off my templates to the back-end team, cried for a couple of days, and moved on.