CR : Spring Into Romance

I just launched the website for CR : Spring Into Romance, a volunteer run yearly conference for readers of romance novels. Exceedingly feminine color theme, yes, but I got to experiment with bringing a highly technical layout theory from the world of print design into a web page: baseline grid. Of course I have no print design background myself, so credit for the concept of taking it to the web goes entirely to Mr. Jon. An article explaining the theory of baseline grid, and my experience making it happen in XHTML + CSS is in the works.

Flash form? NO!

Speaking of hot, check out these form fields. There're certainly not for http://www.picment.com/articles/css/funwithforms/ any web app, but Søren discusses usability and other considerations in his article Fun with forms - customized input elements.

Popgrafix Hentai Art

I've never been a huge fan of pop art, but toss in a little bit of tasteful* hentai and it's actually very nice. I guess if pop art is distilling something down to it's simplest form then adding bright colors if the orignal is a soup can it's fairly lame, but if it is a naked women it's hot.

^* not to say I don't like the tenticle stuff, just wouldn't fit here.

Intuos2 - The Professional Tablet System

New item on the wish list. See how the drawing of the wizard's duel cards goes before I think about getting one. I've been in a creative mood lately.

Styling <abbr> in IE

These crazy romance readers have their own set of abbreviations which, while they are an almost necessary convenience for those who use them could be intimidating to someone new to the conference. But of course IE only supports the accronym tag, which they really aren't, so I tracked down this workaround. It would be ugly if you had to put in the extra span with a title by hand, but in steps javascript (not the DOM because IE is too gimpy) and we have a solution. I'll apply this solution to the yet un-launched CR2004 website, then maybe here, though the inline markup may be getting a little out of hand what with the typography enhancments and such.