Notes from Johnny Paycheck

By Todd Stadler · Tuesday, April 10, 2007 11:25pm

Dear Blog,

I've been so busy with work lately that I haven't had time to tell you how busy I've been lately. With work.

Ironically, what has kept me from working on my Web site is working on other Web sites. Remember that time that fly got in my chardonnay? No, the black fly? Well, it's like that, only more so.

Anyhow, one of the things I've been doing the past few months at work is creating small Web sites to highlight some of the titles from this season. It's fun work, because I get to build a site from the ground up, and I have more or less total control over things — design, layout, scripting, the works. Which also means it's all my fault, I suppose.

Both the sites I've made tend to be glorified hypertext book excerpts, but I think they both do a decent job of explaining (and hopefully, selling) their respective books.

The first Web site I made was for the book A Pattern Garden by Valerie Easton. For you architecture or design nerds out there, yes, her book is a nod to Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language. For the rest of you nerds who might be wondering "What is a pattern garden?", well the site answers that on the front page.

It's a clean, simple design, with the top navigation loosely inspired by the word "pattern" — I see it as a sort of cross between a quilt and an overhead garden plan. I really got to exercise my Illustrator skills drawing all those icons. And then I shrunk all the details down to 74-pixel-tall squares. Oh well.

The second book site I did was for The Encyclopedia of Grasses for Livable Landscapes by Rick Darke. The book has two sections: several chapters on the beauty of grasses, their place in a sustainable landscape, and so on; and an encyclopedia of several hundred grasses. (Lawn mowers, take note: not that kind of grass, so much.) The Web site reflects that division in its book excerpts.

When I started off designing the Livable Landscapes site, I strove to not copy the Pattern Garden design, and only sort of succeeded — both have similar green (-and-white) palettes, inspired by their plant-ish content. I'd wanted to use rounded corners again (a reaction to the fact that rectangles are far too easy — and therefore too common — on the Web), but decided against it. Instead, I used fades to satisfy my non-rectangular hang-up.

The site is inspired by the look of grasses: tall, skinny, varying minimally but frequently in color. Actually, the whole site is centered around a motif that comes from a single row of pixels from the book's cover. So it's like a photograph of grass, only not. Sometimes, I really like the design. Other times, having spent way too much of my recent time looking at that site, I can't stand it.

I'm pretty happy with the (unobtrusive) Javascript I conjured up for the Encyclopedia of Grasses site, though. Pretty much all it does is display a pop-up window to show you a bigger image when you click on a smaller one, but the code for it is just more pleasing than stuff I've written before. Plus, as far as I can tell, it's very cross-browser. Which is nice.

Anyhow, that's my work these days.