Sidera Design » web design

Typography poster Design instruct tutorial

paul — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:12:02 +0000

I followed this tutorial at Design Instruct

PSD to WordPress for a catering business

paul — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:29:28 +0000

A client came to me with a website design in Photoshop and I converted it to a WordPress theme.
I enjoyed creating the theme as it was quite challenging, and I learned a lot about creating child themes for the Hybrid framework.
This is my fifth Hybrid child theme.
The homepage has a featured post area, a latest posts area, all widgetized and easily editable from the admin panel.
There are different page layouts, 1,2 & 3 columns.
I used the widgets logic and query_posts combo extensively which allows a lot of control from the admin panel, which is one of my goals when creating a theme. I try to make everything dynamic and editable.

IE transparency and font rendering

paul — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:16:09 +0000

While designing a website, I wanted to add some semi-transparent backgrounds using CSS rgba.
In this article, the author suggests using a PNG as a fallback for browsers that don’t support the rgba declaration.
Having read about Internet Explorer’s proprietary filters, I decided to use that instead, to avoid having to download another image.
I added the following declarations to the IE stylesheet with conditional comments:

.content, #primary {
       background:transparent;

     filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr=#80ebe7e7,endColorstr=#80ebe7e7);

	}

.page-title, .singular-page-title {
	       background:transparent;

                  filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr=#80146ea4,endColorstr=#80146ea4);
}

This is the result:

You can see that the result is not very pretty! The font doesn’t seem to render very well.

I suspected that the IE filters were the culprit, so I removed the declarations, and here is the result:

Much better!

Conclusion: I’ll use the PNG fallback method.

Have you experienced this issue? Is there a fix?
Leave your comments!

Announcing the new design!

paul — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 05:19:01 +0000

A new year, a new website!
As you can see, I’ve completely redesigned SideraDesign.com.
Changed from a 1 page portfolio to a fully fledged blog powered by WordPress and a custom theme
The main features are:

Widget areas in the content and footer
Jquery post content slider
Coming soon: Typographic grid
New logo!
Sleek and modern look
Smart use of shortcodes with the MySnippets plugin

And many more.