colophon
col·o·phon
Pronunciation: 'kä-l&-f&n, -"fän
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin, from Greek kolophOn summit, finishing touch; perhaps akin to Latin culmen top;
1: an inscription placed at the end of a book or manuscript usually with facts relative to its production
2: an identifying device used by a printer or a publisher
This page has been created to provide some interesting information about this site. Here are some of the technical details.
Typography
The body text is set in Georgia. It may be unavailable in some PCs. In such a case, the font will be replaced with Arial. The line spacing for the body text has been increased using CSS; this will help in visibility and ease of reading. (I can understand how painful it must be on the eye to read off of a computer screen.)
The page headers are in Trebuchet. It looks clean and well rounded on-screen and is somewhat of a contrast to the rest of the site, which if you observe is just a collection of horizontal and vertical lines. If in the unfortunate event of any PC not having the particular font, it will be replaced with Georgia, and that failing, with Helvetica.
The top links are in Trebuchet (uppercase). As before, if the particular font is not present in the system, Arial will be used as a substitute. Unlike the links in the left panel (Georgia), the top links are shown in a sans serif font to aid contrast.
The heading text (‹DESIGNS ON YOU v.2›) is an image, using an image-replacement technique. The code is marked up in XHTML as a heading, and the image is substituted. The typeface used for the heading is CA Aries, a nice contrast to the rest of the site typography.
Graphic Design
The design of the site has been created using earthy colours. The structure is a collection of horizontal and vertical lines, contrasting with the header graphic text. The site background has a ribbed feel as against the body of the site which is mostly clean with liberal whitespaces.
The two-column layout was chosen because it is suitable for presentation of the type of content being displayed. The left column has been used to display links to informative pages (such as this one!) and our site's validation links. You can click on the links to validate the page's markup and CSS. More on that will come below.
Known problems:
Internet Explorer 5.x doesn't display the menu on the side bar properly. In addition, it doesn't centre the content but stretches 100% of the screen. We wish all visitors to the site to have a pleasant experience while here and we do hope no one faces any serious problems. Quite a few websites (like this one) nowadays use advanced techniques to display content and graphics which older browsers are not able to interpret properly. Not going into any controversial finger-pointing, perhaps it's time for an upgrade?
Our graphics are done in Adobe Photoshop, and our XHTML and CSS are hand-coded in SEEdit and CSSEdit respectively.
A word on Web Standards
Web enlightenment has been achieved thanks to the tireless efforts of organizations like the W3C, WaSP and the major browser creators. CSS needs to be taken seriously by graphic artists today. CSS allows complete and total control over the style of a hypertext document. Unfortunately, designing this way highlights the flaws in the various implementations of CSS. Different browsers display differently, even completely valid CSS at times, and this becomes maddening when a fix for one leads to breakage in another.
We at Designs On You have taken precautions to build this site's markup and CSS to W3C guidelines and specifications. All web design we have undertaken of late attempts to follow the guidelines specified by the W3C as best as possible.
We hope you have a wonderful time browsing through our site and hope to see you again.