About me, Gary Davison
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I recently retouched a child photo of my fiancee for my future mother in law, the results are below:
Original
Retouched version
Posted in Photoshop Work | No Comments »
Just purchased a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS62 camera, loving the picture quality, thought I’d take a few pictures of Snickers my Russian hamster. Plus it isn’t a blog unless you have some pictures of your pets.
Posted in General | No Comments »
Firstly what are ems?
Ems are a unit of measurement in the field of typography, equal to the point size of the current font. This unit is not defined in terms of any specific typeface, and therefore is the same for all fonts at the given point size.
What are the benefits of ems?
The main benefit of ems is keeping the text consistent across all the major browsers when the user increases/decreases the size of the text on a web page.
How I use ems
Now before you start to use ems in your builds its important to note that my default 1 em = 16 pixels.
I have noticed that various programmers have there own methods to make their CSS ready for ems, personally I do the following:
Create a “html” tag make the font size 100%, I then create a “body” tag with the font size as 1 em this solves the notorious font re-sizing issues that IE6 users experience. Now my body tag has a value of 1 em, and remember 1 em = 16 pixels. From this I can now work out the em values that the rest of my text should have.
As I’ve never been one for maths, I tend to use a em calculator, one can be found here, others are out there, this saves you having to work out the value through using the em formula, alternatively you can look at a em conversion table such as the one found here. When using a em calculator you have to start by specifying the body value, which as stated above I’m going to have as 16 pixels (1 em). Once this value is specified we can then branch off it by creating a new nodes, in which we can enter a new value such as 14 pixels. When entering a new pixel value into a node you will be given in return the relevant em value, which in the case of 14 pixels will be 0.88 em.
Posted in Coding | 3 Comments »
I haven’t posted in a while, something which I intend not to make a habit of. So I thought I’d post a piece of work that I completed in Photoshop:
Posted in Photoshop Work | 1 Comment »
Just come back from the FOWD (Future Of Web Design) Tour in Bristol, the event was held in the Watershed which I would describe as a art house cinema, housed along the waterfront in the city center of Bristol. I had a fantastic time, talks from Elliot Jay Stocks and Paul Boag were of particular interest. Elliot talking the attendees through the recent creation of his portfolio, and what he learnt along the way was really inspiring and made me want to go and re-design my own site all over again.
Boag had a interesting talk, and it was great to learn how an agency such as Headscape approaches a brief, however I did feel (as stated by himself) that they are more of an exception than a rule. For example he talked of how they interview a client’s stakeholders to gage their opinions on the existing site (if their is one) and on what they would like the re-design to feature. I fear that for most agencies there wouldn’t be enough room in the budget to allow them to undertake such interviews.
Bruce Lawson of Opera was also there, giving a interactive talk on the future of HTML 5, encouraging everyone to code along with him, which was great its always nice to learn while doing. The fact that the <head> and <body> tags are not required for the doctype was an intriguing revelation. And I was keen along with most in the room to go back and re-code existing sites in html 5, as all major browsers except one display the spec fine, however the fact that IE requires javascript in order to display it correctly I think deterred a lot of people including myself.
All in all, great day, learnt a lot and meet some cool people along the way.
Posted in General | 2 Comments »