Webdesigner Depot just published my first article written for them, all about the ongoing struggle between designers and developers for the heart of the Web. In the article, entitled “5 Pet Peeves Designers Have With Developers (and How to Avoid Them)“, I  wanted to air some of the gripes I constantly hear from those who visualize the Web against those who build the Web and suggest some ideas for how to resolve them.

A little taste from the article:

Peeve #2: “The colors are all wrong!”

You don’t choose colors arbitrarily, but developers seem to think that “close is close enough.”

Issue
I don’t know whether this is true of all developers, but I once worked with a developer who was red-green color-blind (he was a huge fan of our content manager, who sent all of her emails in pink text on a lime-green background). However, being color-blind didn’t stop him from being a kick-ass developer.

Solution
If you want the colors to be right, then spell out all of the color values on the page. Don’t rely on your developer to eyeball the color values or to sample the colors in Photoshop.

You also need to consider that the problem may not be with the developer but with you. Colors look different on a Mac and in CMYK (if you happen to accidentally enable that color space). Make sure that your document color mode and proofs are set to generic RGB by default.

Tags: Excerpt, Web Design, Web Development by jason
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Sign up for the online CSS Summit.

My friends Chris Schmitt and Ari Stiles have been working hard to set up what looks to be a really cool online learning event on July 18th—the CSS Summit. Besides myself, the CSS Summit will have some amazing speakers like Molly Holzschlag, Stephanie Sullivan, Kimberly Blessing, Dave McFarland, Zoe Gillenwater and Christopher Schmitt.

The topics being talked about include:

• Future CSS and Markup
• Troubleshooting IE6
• CSS3
• Coding Layouts
• Web Typography (that one’s mine)
• Web Form Elements
• Flexible Layouts

The CSS Summit will take place online Saturday, July 18 from 9 a.m. to 5p.m ET. Tickets are $139 for a single user or $439 for a meeting rum, but you can get $25 off is you use my discount code (CSSJASONCT).

Register now!

Tags: CSS, Conferences, Typography, Web Design by jason
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Thursday, after a last minute fire drill when it looked like Chapter 4 was going in the book almost unedited due to version control issues, Speaking In Styles is finally off to the printers and out of my hands. I can now relax a bit, and catch up on all of my other projects.

I am proud of what I have done in this book. It’s the first time I did all of the book design—even did the cover, which is extremly rare. This one is all me, but it did not happen with out a lot of help and some pain.

For my next book, which I’ll talk more about in a week or so, I’m thinking I will embrace InDesign more fully. Not only will I use the new Adobe CS4 book capabilities, but I’ve started playing with InCopy for writing and hope I can convince my editors to embrace it. We had a lot of issues working in Acrobat, but I just can not go back to using MS Word.

Any advice my readers can give on InCopy would be most appreciated.

[posted from my iPhone, so please excuse the tyypos.]

Tags: publishing by jason
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