Colin Grist - Website Designer, Developer and General Rambler » Code

Google Chrome Text Opacity

Cg — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:00:43 +0000

Came across a very strange bug today when checking out a website in Google Chrome. White copy on a black background was not appearing, I could select the text and could also see it in Chrome’s Element Inspector. I changed the color to ‘yellow’ from ‘#fff’ in the Inspector and suddenly the copy appeared but

Gowalla 4.0

Cg — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 11:39:32 +0000

Off the back of my original post about Gowalla, the team there have now released an updated version of the app and it’s absolutely beautiful to look at! The update is stunning from a design perspective especially that loading animation when refreshing your lists, however I do feel the app itself has taken a direction

Kick To Pick

Cg — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 18:08:19 +0000

A good friend of mine, Mr Nathan Parks has just had his first app hit the Apple App Store and it’s a really great little app. The app is called Kick To Pick, you may have even heard about it, it’s a very simple app, but with a lovely little idea – it will pick

Oakway Cakes!

Cg — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 12:45:31 +0000

I have just completed a brand-new website for baking enthusiast Fearne Lewis (my girlfriend), over at oakwaycakes.co.uk. It’s called “Oakway” Cakes & Buns after the street where we both live, its a blog basically about all of Fearnes cakes that she likes to bake and what she will be learning now she is taking classes

Responsive CSS

Cg — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 13:40:23 +0000

I made my website more ‘Responsive’ this week after reading this great article. By adding in a new media query which, detects if a user is viewing my website on a device with a screen resolution of 480px or less, (iPhone users etc) a new CSS file is used called iphone.css which, I then use

CSS3 Button

Cg — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 00:57:53 +0000

I was bored so I created a CSS3 only button, with some nice grads, text-shadows, border-radius, box-shadow and :active styles too, I think it came out looking pretty great. The button uses no images at all and the markup consists of simply an <a> tag with a <span> inside – simple. Check out the shiny,

Hardboiled Web Design

Cg — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 18:31:16 +0000

Following up on my previous post regarding Looking back is not the future I started reading the latest book by web supremo Andy Clarke, that book is titled ‘Hardboiled Web Design’ and is all about embracing HTML5 and CSS3. Hardboiled Web Design has been a very interesting read with some brilliant quotes, storytelling and great

Looking back is not the future

Cg — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 19:13:21 +0000

Take a look at my website in IE7, it looks wrong, probably looks even worse in IE6. I know it looks wrong and because I want it to be right, it plays on my mind. So, why don’t I sort it?, well, firstly I do that a lot, I do a lot of pixel nudging

Nevermind the Bullets

Cg — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 13:27:57 +0000

I saw this quite a while ago now, but everytime I look at it, it still blows me away, especially when you realise this is to show off what you can do in IE9! Using HTML5 this is parallax scrolling at it’s finest, to show characters moving from and to different sections of the comic

GuideGuide

Cg — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 12:01:19 +0000

Cameron McFee has created a new grid tool for use in Photoshop CS4 and above. It’s really simple to install, is available for both Mac and PC and helps to do some really handy things (that you’d think would already be available in Photoshop) such as finding the midpoint of your document and adding margins,

Typekit wonders

Cg — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 21:41:46 +0000

After the Build Conference I have started looking into using Typekit for better typography on websites that I build. The first site that’s going to use Typekit is my new website which, should be up in a couple of days. I have to say; Typekit is both an excellent idea and amazingly simple to implement,

Me.com

Cg — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 14:23:33 +0000

Apple’s new Me.com is up now, you don’t even have to sign in to witness the beauty, this page is beautifully designed and is using some modern HTML5/CSS3 techniques such as canvas and webkit to make the particles follow your mouse around in the background, it also adds sheens to the iPad/iPhones in the background,

Neat Google easter egg

Cg — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 21:05:19 +0000

A work colleague recently pointed out that if you currently Google the term “World cup” that the normal Google results pagination at the bottom changes from Goooooooooogle to Gooooooooooal!, pretty cool, that letter ‘a’ looks a bit strange, mind! If you’re too lazy to Google it yourself let me do the hard work for you.

Loremify – Bye Bye Lipsum.com

Cg — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 23:02:51 +0000

It’s a sad day, I’ve probably used lipsum.com for my Lorem Ipsum placement text for designing since day one, well, I probably won’t be going there anymore, Not now i’ve got this sexy widget! Loremify is a mere 400KB download dashboard widget for the Mac, it’s free of charge, looks gorgeous and enables you to

Steve Jobs’ Thoughts On Flash

Cg — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 09:37:15 +0000

Steve Jobs has finally blogged about what Apple’s problems are with Adobe and their Flash Player plugin, and being honest, he’s got some very, very good points. You can view the full article here at apple.com. It’s a great read and clears up some very basic arguments about why Flash should/shouldn’t be on the iPod,