A glimpse to the shiflett.org look
I’ve been a fan of Chris Shiflett’s site since late last year. One thing that really made me come back to this site was not the content but the design - I am not an RSS fan :D. I tried to mimic it and got a very poor outcome. The site is very easy on the eyes. Even the color is gray, I like how he played it with orange so it does not look so boring. The background images looks like wallpaper but it just complements everything. It looks so neat with the metal like surface. I like the fonts — I am a fan of Arial and Verdana - and specially the icons. I love the spacing and alignment of the content! I could not find a thing that I don’t like.
When I read the About section of his website the more I respect him. Shame on me I tried to mimic his site without really considering the background story. Everything was well planned - xhtml validity, accessibility, icons, content, GUI… Just to give you a snippet of what he said:
Accessibility was a baseline design ethic. The markup is ordered logically. The contrast should be sufficient for most users, and text resizing is accommodated as far as possible in the default style; relative values are used for everything. There’s an additional single-column “light” style (linked via the utilities menu above the search form). The site has been manually checked to Priority 2 plus conformance to the WCAG 1.0 with extra screen reader checks for critical objects like the calendar.
I haven’t seen really someone discusses this but he is an expert so I think that should just be really taken into consideration, right? Not everyone I guess but it is a good starting point for me to take notice. I’ll be a little more aware now when I design the next petixe look. If you notice, I am doing some experimentation with my site. I will be releasing this to the public anyway so I’ll try to make it a little close to perfect with the accessibility chu chu… (chu chu means etc.)
3 Comments
terry chay on January 11th, 2008
BTW, You mixed up the f and t count in Shiflett’s name. (Don’t worry, I do that to him all the time in person… surprisingly he doesn’t notice.)
I think Patrick was going to typo squat all the misspellings of his name.
primerg on January 11th, 2008
ohh.. my deepest apology and thanks for seeing that typo error 
fixed now.. I did that first when I was typing his website to the url box, fortunately there was no shifflet.org — i didn’t learn my lesson *sigh*
Thinking about it again, I forgot to acknowledge the designer! To Jon Tan, I really admire your work — clean and simple but elegant.
terry chay on January 11th, 2008
Jon Tan is a pretty talented guy.
http://jontangerine.com/