Paul Hopkins personal blog » design

Upgraded to WordPress 2.7RC1

Paul — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:37:06 +0000

I have finally completed the upgrade of this site to WordPress release 2.7 RC1. It is technically still a beta so there might be problems, but it is so close to being finished I thought that I would jump straight to it.

I am in the process of completely redesigned the site, in particular to enable the easy downloading of teaching mp3s… so watch out for the change! I will more than likely have to do it gradually due to time pressures.

KKI Website nears completion

admin — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 08:14:41 +0000

The KKI England website design is pretty much there now. There are some minor changes to make over the next week or so, but it’s over to the KKI staff to put all the content in now. KKI’s hope is that this site will give them a better presence and ability to connect with the many hundreds of young people they work with… including hundreds who are involved with them at Spring Harvest. Go for it guys!

wordpress 2.5 almost complete

Paul — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:55:49 +0000

The release candidate of WordPress 2.5 is available now and looking good! The backend has received a visual and conceptual overhaul. It’s looking smarter and makes more sense. It will mean that some of my WordPress templates may need an overhaul. I am also designing KKI England’s website and I will need to design it according to this new version. great an excuse to play with it! read more about this new version. Read more about 2.5 here.

download WordPress 2.5 RC1

a great css reference

Paul — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 08:06:28 +0000

Sitepoint have just released a great resource. An online css reference.

css should be so easy, yet can end up being so complicated, usually because of all the quirks of Internet Explorer and the way it makes things look on the web. For those of you who don’t know, ‘css’ stands for ‘cascading style sheets’ and is the computer code used to make web sites look like they do. This reference could help you hugely as you get into making web sites.

Beautiful Type

Paul — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 08:22:37 +0000

What pleases my eye is beautiful type on a web site. I spend some time online catching up with news, events, projects and reading beautiful type makes that oh so much more pleasant!

In my own designs, there is a system that I have used for some time now, which I believe that I picked up from .net magazine at some point, but have seen it in many places since. I use a global.css file to reset many of the default settings of the browser, and here’s two lines that I have in that file…

html { font-size: 100%; }
body { font-size: 62.5%; } /* now 1em = 10px */

This means that throughout the rest of my css, 1em = 10px and so setting a font size to 1.2em = 12px etc. As designers, we know that we are supposed to use em for text size… it’s more scaleable than the humble pixel. The above code makes for ease of use of the em.

It’s interesting how .1em can totally change the look of a font. This site uses body text of ‘Verdana’, 1.3em, with a line height of 1.5em. If you take Verdana to 1.4em it looks totally different! It’s fun to play around with the different settings. And to help… here’s a wonderful site I have found that enables you to choose a font, adjust the css settings and immediately view the results. It’s cool!

All New Look Website

Paul — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 08:09:43 +0000

the new weblog look is now finished. What a fun project this has been! So hopefully it is now more straightforward, clean lines and looks ‘uncluttered’. I wanted to remove the ‘boxed in’ feel of the previous look. I’ve also switched to wordpress to manage the site rather than building a CMS from scratch. Wordpress is fairly easy to work with and I can happily hack away at it to make it do what I want! Hope you enjoy it.