First and foremost, a Web designer is a problem solver. A client comes with a message they want to communicate, information that they want to share, or a product or products that they want to sell. My job is to find an appropriate visual solution that will tell their story and connect people with the service they are offering or selling.

I craft a solution by visually organizing the text, images and video on the page to communicate my client’s message. I also craft a visual personality that helps supports the communication of that message.

A Hybrid ???

I have always assumed that a Web designer was one who not only came up with a visual design but also had the skills to build that design. My thinking is shaped by the fact that I first got into Web design by learning HTML so that I could create a Web page. This was back in the late 1990’s and visual design on the Web was in its infancy. Slow connections meant that you had to be creative to add graphics to a page and make it efficient to download. So I learned to code in HTML and later in CSS so that I could bring my creations to life.

Hence, I have always thought that it served a Web designer well to know how to build his or her creation (read a recent post on the subject.) There are many times when I will not even do a design comp but jump right into writing HTML and CSS and create as I build. I know what graphics I want to create and I prefer doing that in Fireworks. As I code, I begin to craft the design and start adding in details that make the design really come to life.

It is only recently that I have come to realize that many consider me unique. Hybrid is one of the words that someone used to describe my skills. I never thought of myself that way because most of the designers that I follow code their designs.

What are your thoughts? What word or words do you use to describe the work you do?

A talk from SXSW on the clever things designers put in their design to add pleasure to the experience. I listened to the audio but look forward to viewing the slides since this was a very visual presentation. I would like to think more about the ideas presented here. It goes on usability to adding value to people’s experience and I am really motivated by that in design.

I am currently working on a new design for Campus Crusade’s Summer Mission Projects site. It is an exciting project because it is the first to be a total package. Our team is working on the promotional videos, print brochure, sticker and Web site. The video has been the lead player in determining the common design thread that will weave through all the pieces in the package.

For the Web site, I am using “real-life” elements of a desk and it’s contents and combining it with illustrations that create a fantasy world within the video.

As I have progressed with the design, the headings typography was begging to be a scripted style that fit into the theme of a sketchbook on a desk. Now I was faced with the problem of how to create those headings in a scripted font. I decided to use image replacement for navigational elements. But as I thought about it, sIFR seemed to be a good solution for the content headings instead of image replacement.

I have never used sIFR before and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to give it a try. I found a tutorial, This is How I Got sIFR to Work. The author’s intent was to distill the “official” documentation into a simplier form. I give him kudos on accomplishing that intention.

I was very excited tonight when I finally got it to work. I had been working with it for a couple of hours last week but never had success. Now I am not always the best at following instructions so tonight, I decided to go back and go through each step. (I never follow the owner’s manual of a new electronic toy. I would rather play with it and figure it out myself.)

One of the first things I found was the swf file I created last week did not work correctly so I went back and created one according to the tutorial. Also the first time I was working through the tutorial, I did not download the latest sIFR from the place the author suggested. So as I had worked through his tutorial, several things were not matching up. That had really been frustrating. It was so much easier to have the right version and be seeing the same things the tutorial was describing.

I am so glad I stuck with learning. I think this is an appropriate and smart solution. I will not have to create images for every heading and it was also cut the download time.

I found this via The Rissington Podcast.

I enjoyed his seminar. It was a good review of the material I had read in the book. I am looking forward to rereading his book and applying more of it to my CSS skills.

The second seminar was Understanding AJAX by Jeremy Keith. I knew a little bit about AJAX and this seminar was a great introduction to the concepts of AJAX. The most helpful thing I got out of the seminar was a strategy to use AJAX to enhance a site but not to use it as an “all or nothing” approach as many sites do today.

Jeremy is applying the principle of graceful degradation from CSS and applying them to AJAX. I am really intrigued by this strategy and want to consider applying it to an AJAX solution I have considered for GodSquad. You can view his presentation online.

I also enjoyed getting to know some of the other conference attendees. One guy works for the Orange County Library system, one with the Census Bureau in D.C., and one of the attendees works for Central Wyoming College (I don’t believe he is responsible for their site current design). Most of the people I met are more on the programming side of Web development. I am looking forward to the start of the conference tomorrow.

[tags]refresh06, refresh orlando, andy budd, jeremy keith, css mastery[/tags]

Tomorrow I am taking 2 crash courses, CSS Mastery with Andy Budd and Understanding AJAX with Jeremy Keith. Andy’s book on CSS Mastery is one of the best books I have read on CSS. I am looking forward to hearing from him and practicing more of what I read in the book but have not had time to go back and do.

I am hoping to blog about my experiences at the conference this week. A friend recently cited an article on How to blog a Conference. It is written more for someone who organizes the conference but there are some good tips that even an attendee can use.

Today, I decided to try again using a different CSS strategy. I decided to try to do some absolute positioning to solve some of the problems I was having with my first try. IE6 was giving too much margin or padding to the design and was messing up the curve on the navigational elements. As I tried the absolute positioning today, I was able to solve that problem. I have one other problem of difference in rendering in browsers that I need to solve but I am optimistic. I had “thrown in the towel” but now I am picking it up and giving it another try.

I think I tend to forget how much time I spend working out the CSS each time I have done a design in it. I have done 4 different sites in XHTML/CSS and two of the sites I have done a second design so I have done a total of 6 designs that are tableless. I really like using CSS but it does add a lot more hassle at times because browsers render it differently. I hope IE7 does a better job and makes life a little bit easier as far as designing for it.

[Sidenote: When I think about the book title, I think about becoming a CSS Master which makes me think of Star Wars and Jedi Masters. At this time I am still an apprentice.]

Last week, I started working on changing GodSquad.com from using tables for layout to CSS. I have been wanting to move in this direction for quite awhile now and thought I would do it as part of a redesign of the site. But I continue to be stumped in that creative process so I finally decided to move the current design into CSS.

As I was working on a CSS design last week, I ran into some trouble where the site rendered correctly in Firefox but not in IE6. Reality is that most people are still using IE6 so I have to come up with a design that works well in it. I was really frustrated. I had some inkling that the problem was caused by the way IE renders “padding” but I was not sure I am far enough along in my CSS skills to diagnose the specific problem.

I started thumbing through Andy’s book and reviewed what I had read. I have not been able to use the knowledge I had gained in reading the book in May. I had to turn my attention to working on support for our ministry at the end of May and beginning of June. Then at the end of June, I took a month of classes through Campus Crusade’s Institute for Biblical Studies. It was good to review the book because I realized that I could do a lot cleaner coding with the GodSquad design I was working on. I came up with a plan to do the structure a little bit differently. And I learned some tricks that would allow me to change the layout of a page using the body property.

But I still did not have a solution for my main problem. But I did some tinkering and got it to work. I think it might have been Spirit inspired as I had prayed about my problem and asked God to help me with a solution.

All this is to say that it just brought me back to the fact that Andy’s book is one of the best that I have seen on CSS.

And I have not been disappointed. I have only read a couple of chapters of the book, but it has already been very helpful. The first chapter alone was worth it for me. I went back and rewrote the code for a site that I have been working on. Because I had a better grasp of some foundational principles, I was able to implement better coding which cut down on the amount of code and needless div tags. I appreciated all the tips that Andy gave on structuring, planning, organizing and maintaining stylesheets. I learned so much from only 25 pages. And I was able to immediately implement what I learned.

This morning I read the second chapter on the visual formatting model (box model and positioning) while waiting for new tires to be installed on my car. I was restless with ideas as I gained a better grasp on these foundational concepts. I can’t wait to start using this knowledge to build better layouts and implement better solutions. I just barely got into the next chapter on background images and image replacement. My mouth is watering with anticipation of what I am going to learn next. I can’t wait to learn more and using it in practice.

This is the most practical book on CSS that I have read or looked at. I have tried to work through some others books that are mostly exercises. I gain some insights here and there. But this book has taught me so much and really filled in my foundational knowledge so that I can take my CSS to the next level. This is going to be one of the books that stays on my shelf for quick reference.