Malarkey is Andy Clarke, a creative designer with a passion for accessibility and web standards. This is his personal website.

And more (design) Malarkey

I want to say a huge thank-you for all the kind comments about my new design. As you can imagine, a lot of time goes into making a total redesign, and often designing for yourself is harder than designing for client projects. The comments have been (almost) universally positive and that puts a really big smile on my face.

Even more pleasing has been the constructive nature of much of the criticism. This is encouraging and it is very pleasing that you guys seem to take a real interest in the site. Thank-you to everyone who has commented or emailed me privately with gotchas, help and suggestions.

I, John Oxton Colly will buy you all a beer ;)

(Ed says: Enough with the buck-passing Malarkey! It’s your wallet which disintergrates on contact with bloody daylight!

Impact

Much of the criticism stems from my choice of (the dreaded) Impact typeface for headings, in part down to the way that some platforms render Impact without anti-aliasing.

The use of Impact for the headers has caused cross-platform font-rendering woes for some viewers.

While this layout is absolutely stunning on a system with anti-aliasing, it looks like complete crap on a system without it.

I’ve to agree that it looks a bit rough on my Win2k machine without ClearType.

Personally I dislike Impact because of its vertically extended letter forms and character spacing (kerning/letter-spacing) and I never use it in my normal designs. Without font smoothing or Windows ClearType, at smaller font sizes and certain resolutions, Impact pixelates horribly. But Impact remains integral to the design and is not something I am keen to give up.

After a day of experimentation with both sIFR and image replacement, the site now has shiny, new, graphical Impact headers which I hope you will find less a strain on the eyes. After all, it’s legibility which matters on a content based site and I hope that I’ve struck a reasonable compromise.

2 Tone / 2 Old

I expected a mixed reaction to my serving a different version of the design for the Internet Explorer browsers and I sure as hell got one. Some like it, others don’t.

This is so ridiculous, why should IE users be blamed for your lazyness? Don’t get me wrong, I like your site, I like it a lot but it just pisses me off when designers bash Internet Explorer like this.

Why the hate for IE? I browses in both IE and FF and it really sucks to come accross your site and have the need to switch.

C’mon, don’t hate IE… gimme some color!

Why do you hate the IE so! I know its not the best browser but I still like to use it every now and again.

Well I don’t hate IE. Ska came before Mod, and IE came before (long before) Firefox and other more advanced browsers ;) Ska was designed to be a talking point and I got what I expected.

Watch out for the IE5/5.5 versions when I get more time (suggestions welcome) ;)

Do the Rock Steady

It’s only a few weeks until @media and I have a presentation to finish. So things might get a wee bit quieter around here for a week or so. Have fun.

Replies

  1. #1 On May 14, 2005 08:16 AM Jon B said:

    I like the design a lot, I plan to examine your coding practices closer when I have the time, there are very few sites that I actually think the design of is so good and well made and yours is one of them. I love it, although I’m just about to check out the IE version, I never use IE except at work but since the whole issue has flared up I’m considering firing up the little blue e in your honour.

    Good job mate, it looks so nice and works really well - well done.

  2. #2 On May 14, 2005 08:21 AM Jon B said:

    Ok, I’m in IE and man did it make me smile. The design feels old and out-dated and retro just like the browser - if ever there was a reason to ugrade I hope this will be it, maybe we should encourage people to use better browsers… I’m already hacking my CSS full of proprietry ugliness and cheap hacks to enable something that works in IE, using conditional comments so that only the IE folk get the extra download time hit.

  3. #3 On May 14, 2005 09:32 AM Jeff Werner said:

    My feeling is that targeting designs for different user agents is an interesting exercise with reasonable and beneficial applications, but for my personal/portfolio site I’d want to keep it consistent. I can imagine a client/friend/my mom viewing it in IE (as is there custom) then one day going to show it to their boss/girlfriend/aunt in Firefox and getting confused, annoyed and possibly thinking they’d done something wrong.

    If I had to choose: I love this new Mod design.

  4. #4 On May 14, 2005 09:36 AM Masklinn said:

    The IE version of the design gave me a strange feeling: it’s at the same time a step back (in time) from the "colorfull" version, just like seeing an old flick from the 40’s and an impressive piece of artwork, wonderfully streamlined, very clear, artistically simple. I partly regretted that it wasn’t possible to switch from one to the other one from Opera or Firefox, to tell the truth…

    And as Molly says it, it’s also a real, live demonstration of CSS progressive enhancement… and multiple CSS designs for a given website, too (on a live website, which may leave a longer lasting impression than the CSSZenGarden artworks).

    BTW I think that the current site has too many gifs and not enough PNGs (only 4 images shouldn’t be converted, the others show an average 25% saving from the conversion, and up to 95% for one or two files), try it out with PNG Optimizer (you just have to drop BMP, PNG or GIF images in it and it’ll convert/recompress them).

    And the top menu would be a good place to use sliding doors and "preloaded rollovers", because currently hovering over the buttons makes it flicker if the rollover version is not cached yet, which lowers the impact of the design from a usability standpoint. Not to mention that building a single PNG instead of the current 16 GIFs would be around 60% lighter…

    Anyway, beautiful design(s) and wonderful creation, thank you for that new version of your website Malarkey.

  5. #5 On May 14, 2005 09:47 AM John Oxton said:

    Cripes, that’s gonna be one hell of a round!!! :o

  6. #6 On May 14, 2005 12:16 PM Graham Bancroft said:

    Cheers John, I’ll have a Guinness, kinda goes with the two tone.

  7. #7 On May 14, 2005 01:47 PM Nick Fitzsimons said:

    I first visited the site in Safari, and was completely blown away when, working on a Windows box, I came back for another look and found such a radically different presentation. I spent half of yesterday afternoon going round showing the two variations to the graphic designers at work (I’m just the coder ;-) and explaining the possibilities it suggested.

    It will be interesting to see what happens when IE 7 turns up: there’s been some discussion over the past few months of what might happen if CSS hacks bite back after a partial fix of some of IE’s deficiencies, and this will now be the first site I come to after upgrading, just to see what happens…

  8. #8 On May 14, 2005 05:10 PM Dan said:

    Haha, How cool is that!

    I love what you have done with the site - I’ve always kept an eye on malarkey stuff over the years, and this doesn’t disappoint, good work! :)

  9. #9 On May 14, 2005 09:02 PM Andrew said:

    Great design, just had a gander at your css. And i’m just a bit err… in shock I spose. I’m all for optimising code and I enjoy doing so etc, but gee. For what the design of your site is; does it really need all that css, really?

    Okay I’m no expert, but I was just wondering why use attribute selectors so much, especially for the class attribute. It seems wasteful & pointless…

    maybe I’m missing something blatantly obvious.

  10. #10 On May 14, 2005 09:26 PM Malarkey said:

    @ Andrew:

    For what the design of your site is; does it really need all that css?,
    I was just wondering why use attribute selectors so much, especially for the class attribute.?

    Now there are two good questions, and as I’ve got a few spare minutes on a Saturday night, here goes some quick answers.

    I’ll start by saying that my main syle-sheet is not highly optimised. It will be in coming weeks (reducing it to about 10Kb) but for now, when I’m still making edits (and other people might want to read through it), it stays a bit verbose. There is a fair bit of repetition. This is not optimum, but I know it will be when I choose to make it.

    As for does it really need all that css?, the straight answer is yes. There is nothing in the file which does not serve a purpose. Much of the CSS is very specific to achieve certain effects. But the use of class attributes on the <body> has simplified the total code weight of XHTML and CSS dramatically over what it would have been if I had used lots of class attributes etc. in the mark-up. Of course, compared to a <table> based layout, the saving in code weight is enormous, more than compensating for a slightly hefty CSS file.

    You asked why use attribute selectors so much, especially for the class attribute? The simple answer is because I wanted to. Part of my learning process during the build was to use as much advanced CSS as I could. One other advantage is that attribute selectors filter out older browsers and allowed me to distinguish between not only the design, but also the CSS for advanced and older browsers.

    I hope this helps.

  11. #11 On May 16, 2005 12:04 AM Colly said:

    Colly will buy you all a beer ;)

    Will I f**k!! Buy your own beer, dearest web community. Don’t any of you dare hang ’round me at the bar during @media, unless it’s to offer me a beer - who knows where a bribe might get you. Jeez, do people think I’m rich or something. I wish.

    (End of ’just got off a long train journey’ rant. Feel better now. ;)

  12. #12 On May 16, 2005 11:41 AM Marko said:

    I, John Oxton Colly will buy you all a beer ;)

    Something tells me you guys are going to rock @media, which only makes me more sorry that we’re not coming. Oh, well, hope to see you on another occassion.

  13. #13 On May 16, 2005 02:54 PM Max said:

    The Ska version kicks so much ass… I bow to the master!

  14. #14 On May 17, 2005 01:50 PM Nick said:

    I actually never even realised the coloured version existed, as my RSS reader (sharp) uses IE underneath, and seeing as my firefox has broken badly since the update I switched back over to IE for a while.

    The funny thing is though, I actually really love the b&w look, and having got used to it and then seeing the coloured version, I prefer the b&w. Im not entirely sure why such a big difference between the two though, IE does afterall support colour ;-)

  15. #15 On May 18, 2005 01:48 AM Brian Lawlor said:

    Really do love the redesign, especially the non-IE color version. And at 1024x768, the standards-compliant/Mozilla version renders your design perfectly, with the right margin intact, but in IE6/Win it cuts off the right margin, forcing one to scroll horizontally. Intended? Unintended?