Arkanoid Edition

Another year, another realignment. What started out as a long-term desire to take better advantage of the footer (putting content chunks that were previously in the sidebar down near the bottom) quickly turned into more of a CSS refresh. This version is dubbed “Arkanoid Edition” (coined by Ethan and will make sense to anyone that spent their afternoons at the arcade in the 80s).

There are too many dusty corners to clean up, and so there very well might be some areas that still need attention. But somehow this feels more comfortable right now. The colors are toned down a bit, columns feel a bit more readable, etc. Surely not everyone will be a fan, but such is the life of a web site. Change is good. But it can also be disorienting.

Boxy, but Nice

One of the struggles with the SimpleBits logo is that it’s not a logo at all. It’s an icon. And works terribly in print unless it’s enlarged properly. I’ve debated changing the logo, always settling on maintaining the brand, and instead embracing its pixellated charm. Hence the square, blocky treatments that will likely warm the hearts of 8-bit fans and yet turn away the warm-and-fuzzy brigade.

Fluidity

I’m no longer straddling the fixed/fluid fence! Previous versions of this site featured a little toggle up in the top right corner enabling you to switch between a fixed or fluid width by means of a little Javasript and an alternate stylesheet. How diplomatic. With this new design, I thought I’d try a centered, fluid layout, using left and right padding on the body using a percentage value. That coupled with a conservative max-width set at 900px makes for a wider-but-not-too-wide solution. If only max-width (and min-width) worked in IE (aside from the Javascript fixes that exist).

Hiding from IE/Mac

I’ve also decided to intentionally hide all CSS from IE/Mac this time around. It’s not that it would be impossible (or even that difficult) to get this particular design working. It’s just that, for this site, it’s time to move on and have one less set of hacks to worry about.

What’s great, is that it’s dead simple to hide CSS from IE/Mac using the commented backslash hack just before importing your styles. Here’s my main stylesheet, screen.css, which imports the master styles as well patches for IE/Win.

/* import stylesheets and hide from ie/mac \*/
@import url("master.css");
@import url("ie.css");
/* end import/hide */

IE/Mac won’t get any of it because of that backslash at the end of the opening comment. And this is certainly OK for SimpleBits. Your site’s statistics may vary.

Posterity

Archived for posterity, and a comparison for those arriving here today for the first time, is a screenshot of the previous design.