Design Blog

Hi everyone, thank you for being so patient with me over the last month but things have just gone from busy to busier! I am currently working on web designs, t-shirt designs, logos, identity kits and the list goes on. However I have not forgotten my blog and have a few goodies coming up soon!

I am so busy that I don’t have a lot of time to work on the text within my portfolio and blog and need someone who can come up with a brand new text intro and creative writing for my portfolio. I also need someone to check my blog for mistakes and grammar errors. I would like to apologise now for mistakes I have made in my grammar and feel slightly embarrassed to say the least.

So who on earth would want to do that? Well I have decided to do a full FREE website design and make-over for the person who sends me the best ideas and well, beautiful well written paragraphs for my portfolio and blog. I am going to open this competition starting today and finish it when I feel a winner has been found!

I am also working with some young talented designers who may join the Pixel Criminals team but I will keep you posted on that.

So till next time, Post your ideas, thoughts below or visit the Pixel Criminals Portfolio at http://www.pixelcriminals.com and fill in the contact form with your creative writing and or new portfolio text ideas and concepts.

Paul

Filed under: Competition, Pixel Criminals, Uncategorized, Web Design by eyebrowpaul
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Over the past 2 weeks we have had a crazy amount of comments good and bad and to be honest we are really happy for all of them. We were so delighted that we felt we should post a few here for everyone to view. We would like some feedback from you too so read over the following quotes and let us know if you agree or disgree.

The splash page is bad for SEO, and is one more step between your content and the user. I hear your reasons but it’s not enough to warrant the page, get rid of it. If it is important use code to detect the browser and then redirect the user if they will not be able to use the site.

I think the funky fresh comment was just reflecting on the humor of the statement since it is funny in an early 90s flashback kind a way.

I think your copy needs to be reworked. There are some small grammatical issues and the whole third person thing (constantly referring to pixel criminals as an outside party) becomes tiresome and a little strained quickly. You are = you’re not your

Regardless, the site is very attractive.

Good Job

funky-fresh just doesn’t say good communicator. It says kids playing at being professionals or old guy (I’m old I know) trying to be hip (I am not hip at all).

I liked the layout and the art. I agree about the design needing to be more consistent across all the pages. I liked the blog content and enjoyed reading it.

I did not notice the load times the others mentioned.

You should take the style of the splash page and make all the other pages follow that.

EDIT:
I take it back, I visited the site again and yeah the load times are noticeable.

I don’t mind splash pages. I don’t know why everyone complains about them. You have awesome work and your website is dope.

I don’t like splash pages. I don’t want to go to your site and be greeted with a “gate keeper”. It is one more step to getting to the content. It takes away from the flow of the site. There is no reason for me it. I find them annoying and often won’t navigate any further into a site. I especially have sites that are created with an elitist attitude and insult my choice of browser and tell me that in order to see what services they offer, I have to change the software on my computer. I don’t think so.

Your site looks and feels like a blog. It does not feel like a portfolio. I feel like I am dealing with an amateur. The site clearly was not made by an amateur, but the blog feeling it has takes away from what is otherwise advanced programming and design. I feel it cheapens you.

The news/blog link. Make up your mind. Is it a blog link or a news link? If you need both, make two buttons.

I don’t like sites that open pages in a new window unless they are printer-friendly pages or direct me to a different site for a particular reason.

These are just my opinions. Other than these issues, I think your site is great. You obviously have well developed programming and design skills.

Hi Paul
I love the striking first impression of your site. The graphics are great. It’s a shame the portfolio part only shows small version of your work within you client’s websites - I want to see your designs in all their glory - have you considered including a personal gallery where people can see full size artwork?

great site its lovely! like the contact info on the first page i hate having to search for someone’s email, i would say it would be nice to click on the image to zoom in a bit but it would mean the site slowing down like you saids. Really nice!

That is a few to say the least and I think they all make some critical comments and points. I havn’t really focused too much on the ones of praise but more towards the ones that really crit something. Hope you enjoyed reading them and please let me know what you think. Paul

Filed under: Pixel Criminals, Uncategorized, Web Design by eyebrowpaul
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Pixel Criminals portfolio and blog is made up of colourful transparent png’s to create the look we wanted. This took a substantial amount of time, and began with Photoshop and a tiresome amount of layers. Now imagine what that was like when it came to xhtml, css and the web. CSS is the baby behind the design and coding to standards is what we do best. However we took a huge risk and banned IE 6 and below from the site. We will take you through our problem and look forward to hearing your point of view.

To start with, the whole website is built so that the content can be read within a central wrap of 800 px. This wrap is also centered and basically means that the majority of screens can see the content no matter what. Now, because we use so many layers within the site (z-index) we had to make those div widths contain a percent value so that the site was perfect across all browsers, platforms and screen sizes. To put this in English, the design around the content is larger then the 800px content wrap and therfor disapears if viewed using a smaller screen without losing the content, or will centalise all together not matter how wide the screen is.

This in turn meant we had to position the background images within the divs to exact locations. We also had the background repeat value turned off to no-repeat in many cases. Couple this with a lot of divs with a position of absolute and a lovely range within the z-index and you know your heading for cross browser nightmares. Throughout the construction of the xhtml and css we came across mountains of issues but finally hit the nail on the head with what you see now.

Internet Explorer 6

All we can say is what a god damn nightmare… Endless nights with red wine, coffee and headaches. Not only did the site look terrible but it didn’t show the detailed graphics and the potential they commanded. We researched and hacked away, tested and failed and finally gave in. The biggest issue we had was hacking our perfect and compliant css, the css you spend ages perfecting. Why on earth is there a web standard if a huge company like Microsoft can’t follow it? Why is it that as designers we don’t get paid enough as it is but have to work extra long hacking at ie 6 and below just so those 3 people that still don’t upgrade can be happy?

Please see 6 reasons why IE6 must die here http://davidwalsh.name/6-reasons-why-ie6-must-die. This could help you to reason with us a little more! SOoooo….. After all the visual and CSS issues, we come to the biggest issue - ‘png transparency for the heavy graphics and huge lack of it’! We tried php fixes, java-script fixes and a few other tricks and ideas to no avail. The thing is, there are a lot of fixes out there if you have the odd image wrapped in a div that happens to be the same size as the image. But in our case as stated above we used repeating backgrounds, and positioned background images with our divs that had to stretch across all screen sizes and couldn’t be scaled in set dimensions!

So you ask what did that mean for us hey…. well it meant that the png images under the fix would stretch to fit the whole div, they stopped repeating, and in the case of IE, the links within the content couldn’t be clicked due to the z-index properties. We did find a way to have the images repeat okay but no matter what we tried, we could not position them. With that we couldn’t look at ie anymore and pretty much cursed Microsoft with every bad word we could throw at them.

After all that we used a simple script to detect ie6 and below and take them away to a warning page shown below… It states that they are using an old, unsafe, non-compliant browser and that they should up-grade as soon as possible or be restricted to the flash based portfolio gallery. That means missing all the nice layout of the site including this blog designed around Wordpress.

So that leads to the end of this post and really our reason for banning IE 6 and lower. However we would love to hear your comments on what we did and what you would have done in our circumstance? Did we make a huge mistake? Are we following a common trend?

In a couple of days we will add some new posts based on the site design plus some fantastic design related links all freelancers should not be without!

Filed under: Pixel Criminals, Uncategorized, Web Design by eyebrowpaul
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Okay, hmmmm…. We have many ideas and thoughts that will go into this blog within the coming two weeks but when it comes to writing your first post we don’t know what to say? However we will say that our portfolio is finally up and available. It took around 3 months to construct between live projects, and a huge amount of thought went into the graphics as you can probably see. We decided to go crazy on it because it is our portfolio and most likely to be one of the only projects that comes with a free reign in all aspects.

We will keep this short and hope that anyone viewing the portfolio appreciates the graphics and work that went into it, and we do hope to receive at least one comment over the coming weeks whether it good or bad.

Over the next 2 weeks we will be adding quite a few posts about the site and especially the problem with ie 6! We decided to take a huge risk and drop the browser and any ie version below 6 but we will further discuss that next week! Hopefully it will cause a good debate.

Take care. PC.

Filed under: Pixel Criminals, Uncategorized by eyebrowpaul
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