Prasetya Weblog

Introduction

Introducing SMPL07, the newest on the SMPL series. Like the previous SMPL05, the main color is, again, dark red. I love red. Seriously. This design is minimalist, clean, has lots of white spaces, and contains less colors and eye candies. The purpose of the design is simply, to display the content, with a little style. No visual clutter, and the main elements that users normally interact with are easy to reach.

Design

This is the photo that started SMPL07. I was immediately captivated by the simplicity yet strong emotion of the photo. Bright red, who wouldn’t notice? It’s snowing, it’s white everywhere.

Feeling Winter by Fraeulein

SMPL07 started as an old scholarly design, using Serifs and layout much like that of A List Apart, but then overtime, I decided the look to be minimalist and contains less visual eye-candy. The only graphical elements of the design are the logo, the comments “bubble”, and the form icons. The logo can be recreated by pure CSS, of course, but I insist on using an image simply because, I suppose, not all people have “Helvetica Neue 55 Roman” installed on their computer. And I love Helvetica, it’s the best font ever.

Technical

SMPL07 is built upon the heavily modified Bluetrip CSS Framework. Building with Bluetrip is fun, I can quickly create a working template in no time, and later style it as I see fit. And finally, after everything is set, all I need to do (optionally) is to clean the framework of things unneeded and make some adjustments to the default values. So, rather than having to write new style definitions for each element, we can instead modify the current ones and add some of our own. This might be preferable to some people. While for other people who prefer more power over everything, Bluetrip can also be stripped down to its core, the grid framework, and later the designer can define styles for all other elements manually. But then there’s the third type of people who will turn to flame on first sight of the word “framework”, who prefer to code everything manually, and with whom there’s no point of discussing about Bluetrip (move along, guys…).

XHTML 1.0 Strict is used. I guess it’s time to move on from XHTML 1.0 Transitional, and I think, so far, everything is good. Not that I expect some kind of layout breakdown or nuclear catastrophe or whatever. But it’d be pretty cool, too.

The template has been tested on latest version of these browsers:

• Google Chrome (1.0.154.36)
• Internet Explorer (7)
• Mozilla Firefox (3.05)
• Opera (9.6)

I wouldn’t worry of those browsers but Internet Explorer. Even on the latest final version (8 is beta), some things are rendered “differently”, and I constantly fix things just to make them look “right” on IE, to the point that I made a commitment: “No More! Yarrr!”. Now I don’t care anymore about IE versions lower than 7. Come on, where have those people using IE<7 been all along? We’re not on middle ages no more, let’s progress, shall we? There’s still some visual inconsistensies on IE, but I let them be. Argh.

To Do

• Implement the postimage metadata from SMPL05. It’s totally easy, btw, I’m just confused on where to put the image. Hehe.
• Refine the “Archives” page.
• Clean the code (more).
• Improve accessibility.
• Embrace web design standards (more).
• Improve the look and fix inconsistencies

Release

I prefer this one to be personal. All the visual design and codes are free to “copy and paste” on your own project, though. Remember guys, good artists copy, great artists steal. Only the bad ones plagiate.

Response

I suppose there’ll be bugs and whatnots, as is expected from early releases. If you find one, please use the comment form to notify me.

Updates

291208. Revision to the code, the version is now SMPL07a.
030109. Revision to the code, the version is now SMPL07b. Now it passes both W3C CSS and HTML Validators.

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