Introduction
You're viewing this page for one of two reasons: you know exactly what a colophon is, or you haven't the foggiest idea.
For those of you who fall into the latter category, a colophon is, according to Dictionary.com, "An inscription placed usually at the end of a book, giving facts about its publication". The same definition can be applied to Web sites.
Every designer should strive to develop their own style, but all have been influenced by others. I am no different. I tend to take ideas of other designers and try to make them my own, hopefully achieving my own unique flair.
About the Look & feel
I wanted a standards-compliant website (means it uses a valid semantic mark-up), yet something that has it's own identity and character - a bit more playful and approachable for the people am trying to reach-. The browser text hierarchy is Lucida Grande, Verdana, Arial and sans-serif. Myriad Pro Semibold Condensed is used for the masthead. Whenever you see a small, bitmappy font, that's Silkscreen from the talented Jason Kottke.
Structure
This site is authored in transitional XHTML because of the importance of Web standards ; Web standards are a set of W3C recommendations and industry good practices aimed at improving accessibility and usability. The presentational layer is controlled with Cascading Style Sheets level 2.
Flash
Two SWFs that read datas from XML files are used:
- Simple viewer, a free tool for building photo galleries with easy XML editing.
- Slide show pro, a fantastic shareware tool by Todd Dominey also for building photo galleries.
Both of the above softwares are implemented via the useful SWFObject technique.
Compatibility
If you are viewing my site in either Firefox, Safari, Opera or IE7, congratulations ! You are experiencing this homepage in the manner it was intended.
If you are using IE6 or less, you have my sympathies as you are getting a version slightly less dynamic.
Some stylesheets may display the page differently according to the browser you're using. Remember: no browser fully supports the CSS2 Recommendation. Some are dedicated to compliance, but all browsers have bugs and the only reason you don’t usually notice them is because designers work around them. This fact has strong implications on what the web looks like, because developers tend to use cross-browser failsafe solutions and that makes the range of available designs more limited.
In other words, you should not have any problem with those browsers:
Hosting
Hosted by Go Daddy, an efficient American hosting provider.
Javascripts
Several JavaScripts are used on this site.
- Dunstan Orchard and Ethan Marcotte's Nice titles.
- Ajax Tabs Content script (resume and G.U.I pages).
- Highslide (GUI Wallpapers thumbnails).
- pMailForm A convenient Ajax & Js Contact form integrating a Captcha.
- SWFObject (see Flash paragraph).
- QT Object (Panorama Page).
- Animated Menu (GUI and Resume pages).
- Referrer + Welcome Note (Contact Page).
- Sort Table (Movies Page).
Tools
I used all of these tools to varying degrees to produce this Web site:
- Hand coded in BB Edit
- Gfx: Adobe Photoshop CS3
- Vectors: Adobe Illustrator CS3
- Animations: Adobe Flash CS3
- FTP: Panic Transmit
- Browser: Apple Safari with Stand and debug menu
- Alt browser: Mozilla Firefox with the Web Developer Extension
Copyright
The copyright is absolutely abandoned on this site. That means I'm not going to sue you if you display the source in your web browser and take inspiration from my code. I don't like wasting my time, and if you do so, that probably means you like what I've done.
Hardware
I'm not really addicted to ubiquitous beige boxes ;-) This site is coded and maintained on a lovely 15” Mac Book Pro 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo running Mac OSX Leopard.
