You like the new look of kintespace.com?

КартиниApart from yours truly, there are three sources to credit for anything you may like about the new look of kintespace.com:

• The 960.gs Grid System…
• Tomoko Matsushita for suggesting that I use photographic backgrounds (actually I already had this idea but she helped to remind me). The background used, as of this writing, for the kintespace.com home page is from Japan, by the way, not Africa…
• June Edmonds for finally having the time to lecture me at length about color (the last time we tried to get into something technical was in 2008!). This 2011 talk led directly to me using Adobe’s kuler.adobe.com with some semblance of technique.### My interpretations of June’s color talk…

June teaches me to look for these high-level concepts when approaching color:

• Start with one ‘base’ color and then look for its compliment (using a tool like Adobe’s kuler.adobe.com).
• Tint variations of the ‘base’ color means white has been added to the “pure” color.
• Tone variations of the ‘base’ color means black has been added to the “pure” color.
• Neutrals (grays) are not colors.Back when I wrote “CSS Biggest-Box, Five-Color Strategy,” I was completely ignorant of this approach—so that stuff has to be abandoned for my ignorance.

My ‘sole’ contribution to the new design…

I don’t want to misrepresent others in case what follows sucks among the accepted pundits. I consciously used transparency effects to ‘replace’ the “need” rounded corners. My assertion is that right-angle corners in Web design are so “boring” and “old-fashioned” is because these hokey corners define solid fills—and it is actually the solid fills that are “boring” and “old-fashioned.” The cure for boring solid fills is transparency effects.

Here are some flippant statements about rounded corners:

• Internet Explorer 8 (and earlier) is effectively hostile to rounded corners.
• Some rounded-corner solutions using JavaScript cause performance hits.
• Falling back to manually generated images means you are experiencing the tedium of manually generating images.My preference for transparency effects does not free me from the problems Web designers have with Microsoft Internet Explorer. I’m using the jQuery Color Plugin to get transparency effects—which is still in beta—and my guess is that this beta status is in part because of Internet Explorer. The relatively timid reaction my stackoverflow.com question, “IE9 ‘tearing’ background images behind scrolling blocks with background transparency,” suggests this to me.

rasx()