we can ensure that the positioned content elements will always appear closest to the viewer, despite the fact that the navigation comes after the content in the source.
#content {
position: relative;
z-index: 2;
}
#nav_main {
position: absolute;
z-index: 1;
}
Now applying absolute positioning with a negative top value to the
and a higher z-index value than the following
ensures that the header sits not only on top of the navigation but also the styled paragraph which follows it.
h2 {
position: absolute;
z-index: 200;
top: -n;
}
h2+p {
position: absolute;
z-index: 100;
margin-top: -n;
padding-top: n;
}
Dissecting part of Karova.com
You can see the full effect in the wild on the Karova.com site.
Have a great holiday season!",2005,Andy Clarke,andyclarke,2005-12-16T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2005/zs-not-dead-baby-zs-not-dead/,design
133,Gravity-Defying Page Corners,"While working on Stikkit, a “page curl” came to be.
Not being as crafty as Veerle, you see.
I fired up Photoshop to see what could be.
“Another copy is running on the network“ … oopsie.
With license issues sorted out and a concept in mind
I set out to create something flexible and refined.
One background image and code that is sure to be lean.
A simple solution for lazy people like me.
The curl I’ll be showing isn’t a curl at all.
It’s simply a gradient that’s 18 pixels tall.
With a fade to the left that’s diagonally aligned
and a small fade on the right that keeps the illusion defined.
Create a selection with the marquee tool (keeping in mind a reasonable minimum width) and drag a gradient (black to transparent) from top to bottom.
Now drag a gradient (the background color of the page to transparent) from the bottom left corner to the top right corner.
Finally, drag another gradient from the right edge towards the center, about 20 pixels or so.
But the top is flat and can be positioned precisely
just under the bottom right edge very nicely.
And there it will sit, never ever to be busted
by varying sizes of text when adjusted.
Gravity-Defying!
Lorem ipsum dolor ...
Let’s dive into code and in the markup you’ll see
“is that an extra div?” … please don’t kill me?
The #page div sets the width and bottom padding
whose height is equal to the shadow we’re adding.
The #page-contents div will set padding in ems
to scale with the text size the user intends.
The background color will be added here too
but not overlapping the shadow where #page’s padding makes room.
A simple technique that you may find amusing
is to substitute a PNG for the GIF I was using.
For that would be crafty and future-proof, too.
The page curl could sit on any background hue.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this easy little trick.
It’s hardly earth-shattering, and arguably slick.
But it could come in handy, you just never know.
Happy Holidays! And pleasant dreams of web three point oh.",2006,Dan Cederholm,dancederholm,2006-12-24T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2006/gravity-defying-page-corners/,design
149,Underpants Over My Trousers,"With Christmas approaching faster than a speeding bullet, this is the perfect time for you to think about that last minute present to buy for the web geek in your life. If you’re stuck for ideas for that special someone, forget about that svelte iPhone case carved from solid mahogany and head instead to your nearest comic-book shop and pick up a selection of comics or graphic novels. (I’ll be using some of my personal favourite comic books as examples throughout).
Trust me, whether your nearest and dearest has been reading comics for a while or has never peered inside this four-colour world, they’ll thank-you for it.
Aside from indulging their superhero fantasies, comic books can provide web designers with a rich vein of inspiring ideas and material to help them create shirt button popping, trouser bursting work for the web. I know from my own personal experience, that looking at aspects of comic book design, layout and conventions and thinking about the ways that they can inform web design has taken my design work in often-unexpected directions.
There are far too many fascinating facets of comic book design that provide web designers with inspiration to cover in the time that it takes to pull your underpants over your trousers. So I’m going to concentrate on one muscle bound aspect of comic design, one that will make you think differently about how you lay out the content of your pages in panels.
A suitcase full of Kryptonite
Now, to the uninitiated onlooker, the panels of a comic book may appear to perform a similar function to still frames from a movie. But inside the pages of a comic, panels must work harder to help the reader understand the timing of a story. It is this method for conveying narrative timing to a reader that I believe can be highly useful to designers who work on the web as timing, drama and suspense are as important in the web world as they are in worlds occupied by costumed crime fighters and superheroes.
I’d like you to start by closing your eyes and thinking about your own process for laying out panels of content on a page. OK, you’ll actually be better off with your eyes open if you’re going to carry on reading.
I’ll bet you a suitcase full of Kryptonite that you often, if not always, structure your page layouts, and decide on the dimensions of those panels according to either:
The base grid that you are working to
The Golden Ratio or another mathematical schema
More likely, I bet that you decide on the size and the number of your panels based on the amount of content that will be going into them. From today, I’d like you to think about taking a different approach. This approach not only addresses horizontal and vertical space, but also adds the dimension of time to your designs.
Slowing down the action
A comic book panel not only acts as a container for its content but also indicates to a reader how much time passes within the panel and as a result, how much time the reader should focus their attention on that one panel.
Smaller panels create swift eye movement and shorter bursts of attention. Larger panels give the perception of more time elapsing in the story and subconsciously demands that a reader devotes more time to focus on it.
Concrete by Paul Chadwick (Dark Horse Comics)
This use of panel dimensions to control timing can also be useful for web designers in designing the reading/user experience. Imagine a page full of information about a product or service. You’ll naturally want the reader to focus for longer on the key benefits of your offering rather than perhaps its technical specifications.
Now take a look at this spread of pages from Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (Diamond Comic Distributors 2004)
Throughout this series of (originally) twelve editions, artist Dave Gibbons stuck rigidly to his 3×3 panels per page design and deviated from it only for dramatic moments within the narrative.
In particular during the last few pages of chapter eleven, Gibbons adds weight to the impending doom by slowing down the action by using larger panels and forces the reader to think longer about what was coming next. The action then speeds up through twelve smaller panels until the final panel: nothing more than white space and yet one of the most iconic and thought provoking in the entire twelve book series.
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (Diamond Comic Distributors 2004)
On the web it is common for clients to ask designers to fill every pixel of screen space with content, perhaps not understanding the drama that can be added by nothing more than white space.
In the final chapter, Gibbons emphasises the carnage that has taken place (unseen between chapters eleven and twelve) by presenting the reader with six full pages containing only single, large panels.
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (Diamond Comic Distributors 2004)
This drama, created by the artist’s use of panel dimensions to control timing, is a technique that web designers can also usefully employ when emphasising important areas of content.
Think back for a moment to the home page of Apple Inc., during the launch of their iconic iPhone, where the page contained nothing more than a large image and the phrase “Say hello to iPhone”. Rather than fill the page with sales messages, Apple’s designers allowed the space itself to tell the story and created a real sense of suspense and expectation among their readers.
Borders
Whereas on the web, panel borders are commonly used to add emphasis to particular areas of content, in comic books they take on a different and sometimes opposite role.
In the examples so far, borders have contained all of the action. Removing a border can have the opposite effect to what you might at first think. Rather than taking emphasis away from their content, in comics, borderless panels allow the reader’s eyes to linger for longer on the content adding even stronger emphasis.
Concrete by Paul Chadwick (Dark Horse Comics)
This effect is amplified when the borderless content is allowed to bleed to the edges of a page. Because the content is no longer confined, except by the edges of the page (both comic and web) the reader’s eye is left to wander out into open space.
Concrete by Paul Chadwick (Dark Horse Comics)
This type of open, borderless content panel can be highly useful in placing emphasis on the most important content on a page in exactly the very opposite way that we commonly employ on the web today.
So why is time an important dimension to think about when designing your web pages? On one level, we are often already concerned with the short attention spans of visitors to our pages and should work hard to allow them to quickly and easily find and read the content that both they and we think is important. Learning lessons from comic book timing can only help us improve that experience.
On another: timing, suspense and drama are already everyday parts of the web browsing experience. Will a reader see what they expect when they click from one page to the next? Or are they in for a surprise?
Most importantly, I believe that the web, like comics, is about story telling: often the story of the experiences that a customer will have when they use our product or service or interact with our organisation. It is this element of story telling than can be greatly improved by learning from comics.
It is exactly this kind of learning and adapting from older, more established and at first glance unrelated media that you will find can make a real distinctive difference to the design work that you create.
Fill your stockings
If you’re a visual designer or developer and are not a regular reader of comics, from the moment that you pick up your first title, I know that you will find them inspiring.
I will be writing more, and speaking about comic design applied to the web at several (to be announced) events this coming year. I hope you’ll be slipping your underpants over your trousers and joining me then. In the meantime, here is some further reading to pick up on your next visit to a comic book or regular bookshop and slip into your stockings:
Comics and Sequential Art by Will Eisner (Northern Light Books 2001)
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud (Harper Collins 1994)
Have a happy superhero season.
(I would like to thank all of the talented artists, writers and publishers whose work I have used as examples in this article and the hundreds more who inspire me every day with their tall tales and talent.)",2007,Andy Clarke,andyclarke,2007-12-14T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2007/underpants-over-my-trousers/,design
6,Run Ragged,"You care about typography, right? Do you care about words and how they look, read, and are understood? If you pick up a book or magazine, you notice the moment something is out of place: an orphan, rivers within paragraphs of justified prose, or caps masquerading as small caps. So why, I ask you, is your stance any different on the web?
We’re told time and time again that as a person who makes websites we have to get comfortable with our lack of control. On the web, this is a feature, not a bug. But that doesn’t mean we have to lower our standards, or not strive for the same amount of typographic craft of our print-based cousins. We shouldn’t leave good typesetting at the door because we can’t control the line length.
When I typeset books, I’d spend hours manipulating the text to create a pleasurable flow from line to line. A key aspect of this is manicuring the right rag — the vertical line of words on ranged-left text. Maximising the space available, but ensuring there are no line breaks or orphaned words that disrupt the flow of reading. Setting a right rag relies on a bunch of guidelines — or as I was first taught to call them, violations!
Violation 1. Never break a line immediately following a preposition
Prepositions are important, frequently used words in English. They link nouns, pronouns and other words together in a sentence. And links should not be broken if you can help it. Ending a line on a preposition breaks the join from one word to another and forces the reader to work harder joining two words over two lines.
For example:
The container is for the butter
The preposition here is for and shows the relationship between the butter and the container. If this were typeset on a line and the line break was after the word for, then the reader would have to carry that through to the next line. The sentence would not flow.
There are lots of prepositions in English – about 150 – but only 70 or so in use.
Violation 2. Never break a line immediately following a dash
A dash — either an em-dash or en-dash — can be used as a pause in the reading, or as used here, a point at which you introduce something that is not within the flow of the sentence. Like an aside. Ending with a pause on the end of the line would have the same effect as ending on a preposition. It disrupts the flow of reading.
Violation 3. No small words at the end of a line
Don’t end a line with small words. Most of these will actually be covered by violation №1. But there will be exceptions. My general rule of thumb here is not to leave words of two or three letters at the end of a line.
Violation 4. Hyphenation
In print, hyphens are used at the end of lines to join words broken over a line break. Mostly, this is used in justified body text, and no doubt you will be used to seeing it in newspapers or novels. A good rule of thumb is to not allow more than two consecutive lines to end with a hyphen.
On the web, of course, we can use the CSS hyphens property. It’s reasonably supported with the exception of Chrome. Of course, it works best when combined with justified text to retain the neat right margin.
Violation 5. Don’t break emphasised phrases of three or fewer words
If you have a few words emphasised, for example:
He calls this problem definition escalation
…then try not to break the line among them. It’s important the reader reads through all the words as a group.
How do we do all of that on the web?
All of those guidelines are relatively easy to implement in print. But what about the web? Where content is poured into a template from a CMS? Well, there are things we can do. Meet your new friend, the non-breaking space, or as you may know them: .
The guidelines above are all based on one decision for the typesetter: when should the line break?
We can simply run through a body of text and add the based on these sets of questions:
Are there any prepositions in the text? If so, add a after them.
Are there any dashes? If so, add a after them.
Are there any words of fewer than three characters that you haven’t already added spaces to? If so, add a after them.
Are there any emphasised groups of words either two or three words long? If so, add a in between them.
For a short piece of text, this isn’t a big problem. But for longer bodies of text, this is a bit arduous. Also, as I said, lots of websites use a CMS and just dump the text into a template. What then? We can’t expect our content creators to manually manicure a right rag based on these guidelines. In this instance, we really need things to be automatic.
There isn’t any reason why we can’t just pass the question of when to break the line straight to the browser by way of a script which compares the text against a set of rules. In plain English, this script could be to scan the text for:
Prepositions. If found, add after them.
Dashes. If found, add after them.
Words fewer than three characters long that aren’t prepositions. If found, add after them.
Emphasised phrases of up to three words in length. If found, add between all of the words.
And there we have it.
A note on fluidity
An important consideration of this script is that it doesn’t scan the text to see what is at the end of a line. It just looks for prepositions, dashes, words fewer than three characters long, and emphasised words within paragraphs and applies the accordingly regardless of where the thing lives. This is because in a fluid layout a word might appear in the beginning, middle or the end of a line depending on the width of the browser. And we want it to behave in the right way when it does find itself at the end.
See it in action!
My friend and colleague, Nathan Ford, has written a small JavaScript called Ragadjust that does all of this automatically. The script loops through a webpage, compares the text against the conditions, and then inserts in the places that violate the conditions above.
You can get the script from GitHub and see it in action on my own website.
Some caveats
As my friend Jon Tan says, “There are no rules in typography, just good or bad decisions”, and typesetting the right rag is no different.
The guidelines for the violations above are useful for justified text, too. But we need to be careful here. Too stringent adherence to these violations could lead to ugly gaps in our words — called rivers — as the browser forces justification.
The violation regarding short words at the end of sentences is useful for longer line lengths, or measures, of text. When the measure gets shorter, maybe five or six words, then we need to be more forgiving as to what wraps to the next line and what doesn’t. In fact, you can see this happening on my site where I’ve not included a check on the size of the browser window (purposefully, for this demo, of course. Ahem).
This article is about applying these guidelines to English. Some of them will, no doubt, cross over to other languages quite well. But for those languages, like German for instance, where longer words tend to be in more frequent use, then some of the rules may result in a poor right rag.
Marginal gains
In 2007, I spoke with Richard Rutter at SXSW on web typography. In that talk, Richard and I made a point that good typographic design — on the web, in print; anywhere, in fact — relies on small, measurable improvements across an entire body of work. From heading hierarchy to your grid system, every little bit helps. In and of themselves, these little things don’t really mean that much. You may well have read this article, shrugged your shoulders and thought, “Huh. So what?” But these little things, when added up, make a difference. A difference between good typographic design and great typographic design.
Appendix
Preposition whitelist
aboard
about
above
across
after
against
along
amid
among
anti
around
as
at
before
behind
below
beneath
beside
besides
between
beyond
but
by
concerning
considering
despite
down
during
except
excepting
excluding
following
for
from
in
inside
into
like
minus
near
of
off
on
onto
opposite
outside
over
past
per
plus
regarding
round
save
since
than
through
to
toward
towards
under
underneath
unlike
until
up
upon
versus
via
with
within
without",2013,Mark Boulton,markboulton,2013-12-24T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/run-ragged/,design
108,A Festive Type Folly,"‘Tis the season to be jolly, so the carol singers tell us. At 24 ways, we’re keeping alive another British tradition that includes the odd faux-Greco-Roman building dotted around the British countryside, Tower Bridge built in 1894, and your Dad’s Christmas jumper with the dancing reindeer motif. ‘Tis the season of the folly!
24 Ways to impress your friends
The example is not an image, just text. You may wish to see a screenshot in Safari to compare with your own operating system and browser rendering.
Like all follies this is an embellishment — a bit of web typography fun. It’s similar to the masthead text at my place, but it’s also a hyperlink. Unlike the architectural follies of the past, no child labour was used to fund or build it, just some HTML flavoured with CSS, and a heavy dose of Times New Roman. Why Times New Roman, you ask? Well, after a few wasted hours experimenting with heaps of typefaces, seeking an elusive consistency of positioning and rendering across platforms, it proved to be the most consistent. Who’d‘a thought? To make things more interesting, I wanted to use a traditional scale and make the whole thing elastic by using relative lengths that would react to a person’s font size. So, to the meat of this festive frippery:
There are three things we rely on to create this indulgence:
Descendant selectors
Absolute positioning
Inheritance
HTML & Descendant Selectors
The markup for the folly might seem complex at first glance. To semantics pedants and purists it may seem outrageous. If that’s you, read on at your peril! Here it is with lots of whitespace:
Why so much markup? Well, we want to individually style many of the glyphs. By nesting the elements, we can pick out the bits we need as descendant selectors.
To retain a smidgen of semantics, the text is wrapped in