Web Development, Design & Programming

I began by studying the content (text) of the existing page, making a model in my head of the document flow and hierarchy. I aggregated the sections of the page into logical groupings and assigned each a priority. I also spent time thinking about the purpose of the project, along with the ideas and concepts Dave Shea was trying to communicate when he created the Garden space and opened it up for other designers to contribute.

My Garden lists contained groupings of words and thoughts related to gardening, plants and flowers found in a garden, zen-like qualities, beauty and beautiful things, and characteristics of page design. I also created lists of all the elements, IDs, and classes used in Dave’s HTML, some of which made subtle appearances in the final design.

Using multiple fonts together can be difficult, achieving harmony is challenging, but if you manage it the result can be decorative and striking. Use fewer fonts and your task is more straight forward. Try to make the best of both worlds by selecting fonts with multiple variants and weights. In this way you can take advantage of an array of styles, safe in the knowledge that they’ll compliment each other just fine.

What’s the Nature of my Content? When selecting fonts it’s important to consider the nature of the layout you’re dealing with. Are we talking mainly body copy? Are there multiple headings, sub-headings? Perhaps it’s a magazine layout with decks, blockquotes? When using multiple fonts make sure that the roles are clearly established; if one font is used as a sub-heading, don’t switch to another font for a sub-heading elsewhere. Keep a font’s purpose clear.

How Do I Achieve Successful Pairing? You might have already heard this; successful pairing relies on concord, or contrast, but not conflict. That is to say your selected fonts can work well together by sharing certain qualities, or by being completely different from one another. However, font pairs can conflict in a number of ways – being too similar being just one.

To ensure optimal performance and reliability when rendering pages, you should order the elements within the HEAD element carefully.

Minification is the practice of removing unnecessary characters from code to reduce its size thereby improving load times. When code is minified all comments are removed, as well as unneeded white space characters (space, newline, and tab). In the case of JavaScript, this improves response time performance because the size of the downloaded file is reduced.

Many web sites fall in the middle of these metrics. For these sites, the best solution generally is to deploy the JavaScript and CSS as external files. The only exception where inlining is preferable is with home pages, such as Yahoo!'s front page and My Yahoo!. Home pages that have few (perhaps only one) page view per session may find that inlining JavaScript and CSS results in faster end-user response times. For front pages that are typically the first of many page views, there are techniques that leverage the reduction of HTTP requests that inlining provides, as well as the caching benefits achieved through using external files. One such technique is to inline JavaScript and CSS in the front page, but dynamically download the external files after the page has finished loading. Subsequent pages would reference the external files that should already be in the browser's cache.