col·o·phon n. An inscription placed usually at the end of a book, giving facts about its publication.
From: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Presenting Version 7
The current version of our site—the seventh since July 2005 (see screencaps of all earlier versions below)—has three distinct screen stylesheets attached and one print stylesheet.
For the last few years, we've been too busy to create three styles from scratch, as we'd done in NextDesign's earlier days. Usually, we'll totally redo the primary style, the one you're most likely looking at right now; the alternate styles—in this case, Ice Box II and Vanilla Extract III (see below)—are tweaked, although we're considering recoloring Ice Box.
The point we're trying to make with these three attached screen styles is not to show you how easy it is to change a page's colors (it's real easy), but to illustrate a deeper and much more interesting truth about the power of standards-based websites and how they keep your company's web site costs way down, letting you and your web developer—yes, that would be us—focus on making changes to the compelling content those pages contain, content that generate new customers and more revenue for your business.
Alternate Styles
You can see these other styles if you use Firefox, Opera or Safari to browse the tubes of the Internets; on the menu bar, go to View>Page Style and select a new style. If you go to another page, it will revert to the default style.
The New (and Old) Styles
Retro [elastic]
Layout:
Still using elastic design, described by Patrick Griffiths in his article “Elastic Design” as originally posted on A List Apart.
Changing the font size enlarges or reduces the entire layout (except for background graphics, which are further discussed elsewhere), preserving the proportions of the original design. While there is a default size (fitting comfortably in an 800 x 600 screen resolution), it functions as more of a starting point than a required or even recommended size.
Changing the font size changes the size of the entire layout proportionally, so, while we've designed the baseline site to fit an 800 x 600 screen resolution, users can easily make the site grow (or shrink) to fit almost any desktop or laptop screens.
What I like about this type of layout is how it places more power in the hands of the user without making any concessions on the design end.
Fonts:
<Headings>: "Palatino Linotype", "Book Antiqua", Palatino,serif
<Paragraph>:
Corbel, Trebuchet MS,sans-serif
Colors:
Added a little more Web 2.o style flourishes, something I've been reluctant to use in the past few years, but I do like using textures, hence the loden green corduroy in the header. The orange and yellow just kinda fell into place, as these are colors we've been drawn to in our most recent projects.
Ice Box II [fixed]
Layout:
Fixed width, 750 pixels wide. Again, didn't spend a ton of time fooling around with this style's design—moved some colors around, but aside from spreading the breadcrumb across the entire page (to match the primary navigation just above it) and as usual, fiddled with some different fonts, as below.
Fonts:
<Headings>: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
<Paragraph>:
Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
Colors:
Used to be, it seemed like every site I did was some form of blue or green or a combination thereof. Hadn’t done one in a while, and I had some ideas, plus, blue is a favorite color. I might add some snowflakes or icicles to this one down the road...
Vanilla Extract III [fluid]
Layout:
Fluid width, 80% of available screen real estate. Renders great from 640 pixels wide to 1280—the width of my current monitor, pretty much the same screen resolutions as last year. Also stretched the breadcrumb across the width of the entire page, to match the primary navigation above. As always, couldn't resist fiddling around with the heading and body text fonts, as below.
Fonts:
<Headings>:
Candara, Arial, sans-serif;
<Paragraph>:
Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
Colors:
Pretty much exactly the same as our Vanilla Extract II; just a basic black & white site, with a little light grey.
Print Stylesheet
There is one print stylesheet to rule them all. You can see the effect from any page by either printing or looking at your Print Preview function, found in most browsers under File>Print Preview.
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