For the last few months I have noted on average across my clients sites that IE6 has now slipped to below 40%. Okay this is just a magical number. But for me it has great significance. This is the tipping point for an aging browser on the decline. At this point it goes from the pixel perfect section on the browser compliance matrix to the section major resemblance. This is the grey zone between perfection and the old fall back graceful degradation.
Painting the Web by Shelly Powers is not the type of book I would normally pick up. Having 14 years web design experience means that you tend to have absorbed something in the way of use of graphics on the web, from raster images, to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), which is what this book is all about.
Looking at this book from its title alone, I first thought, Painting the Web was a book on SVG. But I was wrong, well partly wrong.
You ever read a blog post from someone on the top of their game, especially in the design arena and think, yeah that’s great, but I work in the real world, clients will laugh at that idea.
Take for example the presentation Jason Santa Maria gave at the recent An Event Apart San Francisco (see Jeremy Keith’s post, which is what I’m going off third hand). Jason suggests that we start making web sites tell a story.
I can see where he is coming from. It’s a good idea, design wise, get the web site to progress and tell the story, via the design aspect alone focusing on the core deliverable.
Over the years I have been freelancing in the web industry it has been peppered with it’s good and bad times, when you look back on these times you can see a distinct pattern of things that are good and bad aspects of the freelance lifestyle. Okay this is not going to have every solution to freelancing, but at least you get another view point and a few ideas. Now I’m not discouraging people from taking up freelancing, far from it. It]s just a very good idea if you are considering getting into freelancing that you understand the full implications of what you are taking on. This is the first of a two part article.
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