Jason Stanfill

Responsive Design Part 2

To follow up from my first post on responsive design, I have now completed the process. In the midst of going fully responsive I actually tweaked the layout a bit and moved the blog and work portion over to tumblr. (will blog about this later) The easiest thing to do is resize your browser and you can see the sidebar move down and eventually the whole site stack up in line. The really cool thing is that small version is what you see on the iPhone, Android or any other smartphone. All of this is done with media queries without having different versions of the site. I love working on something like this because the new technology does not affect old browsers. Media queries are mainly for phones and small screens and I have yet to hear about a smartphone with IE6. Hope you like the design and that I can get posts up on a more regular basis.

Thanks

Responsive Design Part 1

Inspired by Ethan Marcotte’s latest ALA article, I just finished an overhaul of the underlying structure of this site. This is the first step towards a more responsive design to provide the best experience for people viewing on any platform. This is not about providing the same look for everyone but a design that responds to each platform. The first step I completed is to go from a fixed width grid to a fluid grid. Without doing anything else this at least allows the site to scale well to any size browser.

The next step is to utilize media queries to adjust the layout to be even more responsive to these different platforms. I highly recommend checking out Jon Hicks’ great example using media queries to realign key sections to be friendlier to different viewing mediums. Responsive design is about more than just making your site bigger or smaller. This is a very exciting time in web design and development and with people viewing websites from so many different platforms I look forward to the challenge of still providing an excellent user experience.

New Services

Designing and building websites has always been a passion of mine, but recently I have started to focus on email design. Designing for email is a new and fun challenge for me, but very rewarding. If anybody needs email work done I can design the email as well as set up a system for list management, tracking and all other email marketing needs for very reasonable prices. Just send me a line so we can get started.

Is it 2010 Yet?

I wanted to have a 2010 redesign of my site stanfilldesign.com done to upload Jan 1, but moving and life have postponed that by a few months. I also had the chance to get back my old domain so my freelance effort has officially moved to jasonstanfill.com. You can see some of my old versions on the way back machine. I have quite a few small changes in the works for this design, but did not want to wait any longer to put it online. Hope you like it.

No Posts

I have had this blog for a year with very few posts, so along with a new design I will be putting out for the new year, I am going to make it my goal to post at least once each week for all of 2010. This means I really need to get going to I have something worth saying. I would like to focus most of this blog on my journey to becoming a full time freelance web designer, hopefully I can help some other people along the way.

Giddy Up

Color on the web

I thought I would write about the aspect of web design I already have a lot of experience. I have been working for years in the paint industry and talk to people about color everyday. I have noticed some of the same trends on the web that I see in paint. First, while there is an almost infinite number of colors to choose from most people stick with a pretty safe set of colors. Mostly shades of brown for paint and shades of gray for the web and a touch of another color. Although I have seen a trend in paint as well as the web toward green these days. Another similarity I have found is the extreme emotional reaction to colors people do not like. All you have to do is look at any of Jeffrey Zeldman’s recent posts on his redesign utilizing some intense shades of orange and look at the comments. From my perspective I love to see when color invokes that intense a reaction, that is very powerful.

Inspiration for color either in paint or on the web can come from similar places as well. I like to look around me and see what colors look nice together. You can always look at the color wheel but the color schemes are usually already out there just waiting to be discovered. Some useful resources I have been using while designing sites are the Color Schemer for putting together a color scheme. Build Internet and Color Combos are both great sites for already put together combos. Another invaluable tool is Eric Meyer’s Color Blender for taking your colors and getting many different shades for variation on your site. Lastly, color should be fun so make sure to enjoy the process.