Lilac Creative

Last month I completed a new photoblog for clients Kara Wieler and Becky Radtke of Jack and Ruby Photography. They wanted something clean, simple and elegant to show off their gorgeous engagement and wedding photography. I worked with their existing logo that features a cute and quirky guy and girl that represent Jack and Ruby, the “every” couple. The design I came up with features soft colors drawn from their branding, clean lines, a beautiful webfont script for post titles, and ample white space to give their beautiful photos plenty of breathing space.

Yesterday, I was thrilled to see their blog show up on Blog Design Heroes, a gallery of exemplary blog designs.

Things have been so busy around here for the past few months, that it had been a while since I checked my site stats (which I usually monitor about once a week). When I checked them recently I noticed a huge spike in site traffic about a month back. I checked to see where it had come from I was surprised and honored to find that Lilac Creative had been featured on HTML5 Gallery.



HTML5 Gallery is a site that showcases sites built on HTML5. Not only is it a great resource for creatively designed sites, but it's also a great place to find practical usage of HTML5. I confess to referencing it many times during my HTML5 redesign of Lilac Creative. Each site featured in the Gallery is examined, and the Gallery "curators" make notes of each site's correct and creative use of HTML5, as well as areas where various HTML5 elements could have been implemented in a more effective way. HTML5 is a great contributor to the growth and development of HTML5, and I'm excited to have my site be a part of it.

Looking over my blog on the site, I realized that my last post was the end of August—over 4 months ago! It seems like those 4 months went by without me even noticing, even though lots of major events happened for me in those four months. Isn’t that just how life goes when things get busy? So, just to recap the last part of the year: aside from staying busy with client projects, my husband returned home in late October from a 10-month deployment overseas and shortly thereafter we took our first-ever family vacation—to Disney World, a trip that we had been planning the entire time he was gone. Needless to say, it was a blast! Just before we left for Disney, a certain house for sale in our town caught our eye, despite the fact that we weren’t even really looking for a house. We made an offer on it the week before our trip, and it was accepted, with the closing date set for three days after Christmas (seriously—not even kidding). Home inspection, quotes from professional plumbers & electricians on possible fixes needed, getting the necessary info to our loan officer, PLUS traveling 12 hours to see family for Christmas—all this made for a very hectic holiday season! But we closed on the house (our very first house!) last week, and are now getting ready to move in later this month.

Phew! Lots of stress, but also lots of blessings. That pretty much sums up 2010 for me. I can look back on 2010 with a thankful heart, and looking forward to 2011, I am excited to see what the new year will bring.

Hope your holidays were happy and blessed, and I look forward to working with you, sharing with you and imagining with you in 2011!

Things are looking a little different around here! When ExpressionEngine 2.0 beta was released last December, I started planning for a site redesign to be implemented once EE2 was out of beta (which happened last month with the release of ExpressionEngine 2.1). Initially, there were three things I wanted to “upgrade” in this redesign: the ExpressionEngine templates, my site content, and the visual design itself. ExpressionEngine 2 has some great new templating features (i.e. snippets and global variables) that really help simplify templates, and making use of those, I was able to get rid of a lot of redundant code in my templates and template groups. I used Google Analytics to identify content on my site that wasn’t being used. I ditched anything that wasn’t getting significant hits, and reorganized my navigation to make the site necessities easier to get to. The visual design came together slowly, in between client projects. By the time I was ready to translate the design into HTML and CSS, I started considering a fourth upgrade for my new site design: HTML5.

The Viability of HTML5

There’s been lots of buzz about HTML5 lately, but it’s still currently in the Working Draft stage of its development, which means nothing is finalized and a lot could change in the development process. Just how viable is the HTML5 specification, and should I use it for my site? These were the questions I was asking myself as I approached the coding point of my site redesign.

So I started doing some reading on the subject. I read arguments for and against using HTML5 now. Arguments against using HTML5 right away argued that HTML5 is still in the Working Draft stage of its development, and could therefore change a lot before a stable specification is settled upon. Arguments for adopting HTML5 today pointed out that most browsers already support HTML5 elements (with IE being the exception—big surprise there), and IE is easily accomodated by including a quick and easy javascript shiv to force IE to recognize the new elements.

In the end, I decided I wanted to give HTML5 a shot with this redesign, mostly so I could try out the new specification and get a feel for it.

Calling It What It Is

One of the things I like best about HTML5 is the new elements—they enhance web semantics. Before HTML5, I would wrap my header in a div named “header”, my nav in a div named “nav”, and my footer in a div named “footer”. Now each of those commonly used page sections is its own element. The whole point of web semantics in HTML is to correctly organize and identify the purpose of a site’s content while keeping it separate from the presentation of the content, and the new elements allow HTML authors do just that.

In the same vein, HTML5 forms introduce new input field types such as email, url, color, and tel for telephone numbers.

Useful HTML5 Articles and Resources

Below are some of the articles and resources I checked out when considering HTML5:

• 5 Reasons Why You Can Use HTML5 Today
• Why designers should care about HTML5
• A Preview of HTML 5
• W3C HTML5 Working Draft
• W3C HTML5 Forms Specifications
• HTML5 Gallery - A gallery of sites already using HTML5

Have you tried your hand at HTML5 yet? I’d love to hear why or why not!

Thanks for stopping by the site! I'm going to be taking a little summer break from July 3rd to July 19th. While I'm gone I'll be without internet access (except via Blackberry) for part of the time, so if you send me an email or an inquiry, please be patient. I'll respond to emergencies as soon as possible, and other inquiries as I'm able. Hope everyone has a fun, safe Canada Day and 4th of July!