Blurry, Colorblind and Brilliant

Posted by: Josh Walsh in User Experience.

“Design is in the details.”  - We hear it every day and it is absolutely true.  However, details without a blueprint to tie things together can lead to problems.   We are passionate about details, perfect grid alignment, perfect color combinations, gradients, reflections and textures.   These visual details have a major aesthetic impact on the website, but they can’t replace the content – The reason the website exists in the first place.

Continue →

Why We Are Not Hiring

Posted by: Josh Walsh in Company.

Designing Interactive has grown up a lot over the last 6 years. It has grown from a small freelancing company into a web application development house. We have done a good job of keeping ourselves busy with paid work throughout the years, but this past year was particularly successful.

However, our profitability has started to plateau this year and we need to make some changes to continue growth.

Continue →

Sharing the Grid

Posted by: Josh Walsh in Design.

When it comes to design, I’m a firm believer in simplicity. Occasionally I’m criticized for being overly simple, but I take that as a compliment. In my design, typography, grids, color, imagery and especially whitespace all stand for themselves. They don’t need any fancy treatment or “web 2.0″ effects. They work because they are simple and beautiful in their natural state.

Grids are foundational to all my designs. I always sketch out ideas on a Behance Dot-Grid Book, (thanks to Garrett Dimon for sharing this a few months ago). While these square grids are perfect for sketching idea’s and concepts, they don’t work for fine-tuning your design.

Continue →

Fixing Disappearing Cursors in Firefox

Posted by: Josh Walsh in Code.

The past few days I have been debugging the User Interface for Simpli5. Today I wrestled with a particularly frustrating issue in which cursors were completely vanishing from inputs in Firefox. While it did not affect the interaction of the input, I could still manipulate the text, it did cause quite an annoyance.

Here is a quick example which demonstrates the problem:

The problem is caused by the change in Firefox’s current rending frame. Setting overflow:scroll on our #Container div causes Firefox to use that div as it’s current rending frame. Thus, the cursor is being rendered on the #Container, not on the #Dialog div, which contains the input. Effectively, the input is covering its own cursor.

The fix is a simple change in CSS inheritance. Without setting an overflow setting on the #Dialog div, we are inheriting the overflow:scroll from #Container. By setting the #Dialog div’s overflow setting back to it’s default overflow:auto we are changing Firefox’s rendering frame to the #Dialog div, thus bringing back our cursor.

Here is the fixed example:

Thankfully, Mozilla has fixed this problem in Firefox 3.