24ways: articles: 3 rows where where author = "Andy Clarke" and topic = "design"

3 rows where author = "Andy Clarke" and topic = "design"

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Link	rowid ▼	title	contents	year	author	author_slug	published	url	topic
149	149	Underpants Over My Trousers	With Christmas approaching faster than a speeding bullet, this is the perfect time for you to think about that last minute present to buy for the web geek in your life. If you’re stuck for ideas for that special someone, forget about that svelte iPhone case carved from solid mahogany and head instead to your nearest comic-book shop and pick up a selection of comics or graphic novels. (I’ll be using some of my personal favourite comic books as examples throughout). Trust me, whether your nearest and dearest has been reading comics for a while or has never peered inside this four-colour world, they’ll thank-you for it. Aside from indulging their superhero fantasies, comic books can provide web designers with a rich vein of inspiring ideas and material to help them create shirt button popping, trouser bursting work for the web. I know from my own personal experience, that looking at aspects of comic book design, layout and conventions and thinking about the ways that they can inform web design has taken my design work in often-unexpected directions. There are far too many fascinating facets of comic book design that provide web designers with inspiration to cover in the time that it takes to pull your underpants over your trousers. So I’m going to concentrate on one muscle bound aspect of comic design, one that will make you think differently about how you lay out the content of your pages in panels. A suitcase full of Kryptonite Now, to the uninitiated onlooker, the panels of a comic book may appear to perform a similar function to still frames from a movie. But inside the pages of a comic, panels must work harder to help the reader understand the timing of a story. It is this method for conveying narrative timing to a reader that I believe can be highly useful to designers who work on the web as timing, drama and suspense are as important in the web world as they are in worlds occupied by costumed crime fighters and superheroes. I’d like you to start by closing your eyes and thinking about your own proces…	2007	Andy Clarke	andyclarke	2007-12-14T00:00:00+00:00	https://24ways.org/2007/underpants-over-my-trousers/	design
311	311	Designing Imaginative Style Guides	(Living) style guides and (atomic) patterns libraries are “all the rage,” as my dear old Nana would’ve said. If articles and conference talks are to be believed, making and using them has become incredibly popular. I think there are plenty of ways we can improve how style guides look and make them better at communicating design information to creatives without it getting in the way of information that technical people need. Guides to libraries of patterns Most of my consulting work and a good deal of my creative projects now involve designing style guides. I’ve amassed a huge collection of brand guidelines and identity manuals as well as, more recently, guides to libraries of patterns intended to help designers and developers make digital products and websites. Two pages from one of my Purposeful style guide packs. Designs © Stuff & Nonsense. “Style guide” is an umbrella term for several types of design documentation. Sometimes we’re referring to static style or visual identity guides, other times voice and tone. We might mean front-end code guidelines or component/pattern libraries. These all offer something different but more often than not they have something in common. They look ugly enough to have been designed by someone who enjoys configuring a router. OK, that was mean, not everyone’s going to think an unimaginative style guide design is a problem. After all, as long as a style guide contains information people need, how it looks shouldn’t matter, should it? Inspiring not encyclopaedic Well here’s the thing. Not everyone needs to take the same information away from a style guide. If you’re looking for markup and styles to code a ‘media’ component, you’re probably going to be the technical type, whereas if you need to understand the balance of sizes across a typographic hierarchy, you’re more likely to be a creative. What you need from a style guide is different. Sure, some people1 need rules: “Do this (responsive pattern)” or “don’t do that (auto-playing video.)” Those people probably also want facts: …	2016	Andy Clarke	andyclarke	2016-12-13T00:00:00+00:00	https://24ways.org/2016/designing-imaginative-style-guides/	design
325	325	"Z's not dead baby, Z's not dead"	While Mr. Moll and Mr. Budd have pipped me to the post with their predictions for 2006, I’m sure they won’t mind if I sneak in another. The use of positioning together with z-index will be one of next year’s hot techniques Both has been a little out of favour recently. For many, positioned layouts made way for the flexibility of floats. Developers I speak to often associate z-index with Dreamweaver’s layers feature. But in combination with alpha transparency support for PNG images in IE7 and full implementation of position property values, the stacking of elements with z-index is going to be big. I’m going to cover the basics of z-index and how it can be used to create designs which ‘break out of the box’. No positioning? No Z! Remember geometry? The x axis represents the horizontal, the y axis represents the vertical. The z axis, which is where we get the z-index, represents /depth/. Elements which are stacked using z-index are stacked from front to back and z-index is only applied to elements which have their position property set to relative or absolute. No positioning, no z-index. Z-index values can be either negative or positive and it is the element with the highest z-index value appears closest to the viewer, regardless of its order in the source. Furthermore, if more than one element are given the same z-index, the element which comes last in source order comes out top of the pile. Let’s take three <div>s. <div id="one"></div> <div id="two"></div> <div id="three"></div> #one { position: relative; z-index: 3; } #two { position: relative; z-index: 1; } #three { position: relative; z-index: 2; } As you can see, the <div> with the z-index of 3 will appear closest, even though it comes before its siblings in the source order. As these three <div>s have no defined positioning context in the form of a positioned parent such as a <div>, their stacking order is defined from the root element <html>. Simple stuff, but these building blocks are the basis on whic…	2005	Andy Clarke	andyclarke	2005-12-16T00:00:00+00:00	https://24ways.org/2005/zs-not-dead-baby-zs-not-dead/	design

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