position: absolute - Design resources and inspiration.

Just wanted to wish you and your families a happy new year. I hope the best for you all, and I’m excited about the things I’ll be able to post about the coming year. I hope to see you all back in 2006, and if you like, bring your friends along.

Since I never get much feedback on position: absolute, but my stats tell me there’s more than meets the eye, how about you anonymous readers speak up! Let’s get some dialog going here. :)

On a side note, my apologies for the lack of updates the past week, but you know how busy this season is. ;)

– Jerry

Got two nice little links on the subject of basic and advanced typography today.

typeworkshop.com has a nice collection of material they used for typography workshops (yes, “real world” workshops) over the years, among others an excellent overview of type basics with practical sketches.

If you have read Robert Bringhurst’s classic book “The Elements of Typographic Style“, this may look familiar. Richard Rutter has released a project inspired by the book: The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web

Jon Meyer proposes a new feature for CSS: based-on, a method to significantly shorten your CSS files by using constants instead of repeating similar declarations over and over again. Basically you can add the “based-on” property to a rule, referencing a previous declaration, and thus inherit the formatting from the linked declaration.

In less technical terms, this means you can define a style that a lot of elements will have in common (such as a 1px border) in ONE rule, and just link to that rule from the other rules. As he mentions himself, this is very similar to Shaun Inman’s Server Side Constants.

I achieve the effect by assigning several classes to an element: one base class such as “messagebox” and then a specific class additionally, such as “success” or “error”. Jon’s method, however, seems more sensible, since it removes the need of adding more than one class to an element. I’d love to see this in CSS3. If this all sounds too confusing and technical, do go read the article, Jon explains it in a more comprehensible way with good examples. Definately worth a read!

Does that ad you just saw remind you of something? You have that tingling at the back of your head that you’ve seen something just like it before? Well, chances are, you have! Coloribus has a very entertaining feature called AdMirror which collects ads that look astoundingly similar or use the exact same concept. In a lot of these cases you wonder: coincidence or intention?

Looking for some good sound samples for your latest project? The Freesound Project offers a huge selection of samples created and uploaded by its contributors. The site offers the possibility to comfortably listen to each sample on the spot, has an Amazon-like “users that downloaded this sample also downloaded…” feature, and lets you find similar and dissimilar sounds. The Freesound Project also offers complete sample packs and even lets you Geotag your samples. The samples are all licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 license.

CampaignMonitor has an article up about email design guidelines for the coming year. Quick summary:

1. Never use images for important content like headlines, links and any calls to action.
2. Use alt text for all images for a better experience in Gmail and always add the height and width to the image to ensure that the blank placeholder image doesn’t throw your design out.
3. Add a text-based link to a web version of your design at the top of your email.
4. Ensure your most compelling content is at the top (and preferably to the left).
5. Test your design in a preview pane, full screen and with images turned on and off before you send it.
6. Ask your subscriber to add your From address to their address book at every opportunity.

Read on for more detailed information.

I don’t care much for advent calendars myself, but this is one I think I’ll enjoy: 24 Ways to Impress Your Friends. Every day, they’re offering one new tutorial on standards based web ownage, starting with 1337 Ajax sk1llz and typographical finesse.