‘I find designing with CSS leads me to make decisions based on what’s easiest to code, whereas moving things around the screen visually gets me better results.’

Dave Shea, via his blog.

If I can forget about how hard something may be to reproduce with CSS, this method always produces the goods for me.

For a recent project I created a grid in Photoshop, 900px wide (the traditional 960 wasn’t offering enough breathing space), with guides at 60px intervals. When laying out the page elements I stuck to the grid like glue, and then in the CSS, as closely as humanly possible. I used the 60px intervals to keep consistent horizontal space between similar elements, and vertically align main and footer content.

The results, I think, speak for themselves:

I’ve got a lot out of the associated Port80 forums over the years, and had a great time at both the 2006 and 2007 WA Web Awards. I actually feel a little guilty it has taken me this long to become a paid member.

Now to actually get along to one of the monthly get-togethers…

I think I must have literally 50 half finished blog & portfolio designs scattered around my hard drive. Some of them awful, some of them with potential, but all of them abandoned roughly one week after they were started.

The new site you’re looking at is the closest I’ve come to being completely satisfied with a vehicle to present my own work. So I thought it warranted a post.

I knew the old site needed to change, but the spark didn’t come until I saw some beautiful colour on polaroid.

Dissatisfied with the previous version of this site, I wanted to produce something that could:

• be a portfolio
• be a blog
• grow with my freelance endeavours
• convey honest, quality craftmanship.

I guess the first thing that stands out on the site is the narrow layout. I thought it would help to convey simplicity and the fact that Finely Sliced is a small operation. The higher the resolution, the more it works. I think it may fall down where there is a lot of content on one page, but that shouldn’t be too often.

I wanted to go with a retro kind of colour scheme to bring out the old fashioned craftsmanship feel. I’m hoping the background colour gives it an aged look. I haven’t experimented a great deal with typography, sticking with the ubiquitous Georgia for headings, Verdana for content, and Frutiger for the menu.

What lets it down I think is the logo. Not professing to know much about logo design, I have approached a logo designer to look at reworking it, in keeping with the new colour scheme and style.

Another clean and well executed design that was a pleasure to code.

The site is designed to emulate a coffee table book, with a vertically fluid layout and one entry per page. A nifty index allows for a unique way of searching topics.

Unfortunately I rarely find the time to research and prepare new content.

In 2006 I was responsible for laying out an email newsletter for Western Australia’s Zero Waste campaign.

The newsletter complements the campaign web site, and features stories about recycling success stories and policy development in Western Australia. The average article is relatively long, so I chose to provide excerpts and link to full articles on the web.

I had the pleasure of working with the Campaign Monitor software to handle the delivery and monitoring of the newsletter. Zeroing In was subsequently featured in the Campaign Monitor Gallery.