My Thoughts

I have been aware for years about the importance of scalable / relative units when defining fonts in your CSS. I have read numerous articles over the years but have never been able to locate a decent, easy to understand article which walks you through the whole process.

There are umpteen different /*HACKS*/ which I can not always make sense of what they are actually doing. Hiding it from one browser, inheriting style and so on. It all starts to make my head spin very quickly.

Do you use em, %, font keywords or picas? I have used percentages in previous projects but I always have to write CSS styles which compensate for the way the font gets smaller every time a style inherits the percentage of the text wrapped in another style.

I would really appreciate it if anyone who stumbles across this xx-small cry for help and has found a helpful article or book which deals with relative fonts could post a comment that will send me and any others out there on the path to relative font enlightenment.

Posted by Dean at 10:48 AM | Permalink

Well I haven't put anything up for the last few days. It is not because I have not wanted to but I have been a little bit concerned as to how I should use this part of the site. I am torn between two poles of thought. One being the entire x-lab site is based around graphic design and web design so shouldn't this part of the site continue with the design theme? On the other hand though there is a sense of personality that you can express in your blog entries that may not come across if all you deal with is design.

So for the time being I am going to post whatever I want in this part of the site, if down the line I feel it is detrimental to the rest of the site to have a more personal blog, I can shift the personal entries over to a new blog if need be.

So you can expect to read some interesting design commentry with a good spattering of whatever else I want to put out there.

Posted by Dean at 11:02 PM | Permalink

Well it has been a long time coming but on 30 April 2006 I finally got the new www.x-lab.co.uk site up and running. It has got an updated screenfolio, and CV plus some new features including a search facility which allows me to keep track of the experiment pages I have already created plus all the new ones I will be publishing in the future. There is still loads of experimental designs to come!

Another new part of the site is this blog facility. It is currently in its most basic state, I have literally got it up and running in the last couple of weeks and not had any time to get it customised because of the arrival of my beautiful new son and getting the rest of the site ready. It will be getting a facelift to match the rest of the site in the near future.

I intend to use this blog for anything which I want to write about, it may be design led, a bit of a rant about something and nothing or something else. You'll just have to wait and see what comes of it.

Ok. That's it for the time being this is my first blog entry... FIN.

Posted by Dean at 06:05 PM | Permalink