Colophon: About this site
In book publishing there is a long history of printing, on the last page of the book, a brief description of the typeface used for the text, and any other design related notes the publisher wishes to have known. I have always loved these and seek out the colophon whenever I pick up a new book.
I started this site as I start any design, on paper with pencil. I worked to define the rough layout, the structure of the site, the basic content that would be included and so forth.
From there, I drew mockups in Adobe Illustrator. While this isn’t the normal go-to application for web design, I find that it is much better suited to the way that I work than Photoshop, and honestly, I find Photoshop tedious and unintuitive when working on designs. Perhaps this is my background in print design coming out.
At the point that I had my mockups together, I began building a template page in html and css. From there I built the site as a theme for WordPress, my content management system of choice. I start the WordPress development by downloading Eliot Jay Stocks “Starkers” theme which provides a wonderfully neutral starting point for theme development.
The body type is set in (depending on what fonts you have installed on your computer): Helvetica Neue,Helvetica, Arial, or whatever default sans-serif face you have if the other choices aren’t present. Not all computers have the same fonts installed, therefore a series of fonts is selected.
My logo is set in three weights of FrutigerNext. When preparing mockups for this site, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Verdana bold bore resemblance to the heavy weight of FrutigerNext. That little glance led me to select Verdana – with Arial, Helvetica or default sans-serif as backups — for my headline text. In keeping with the all caps CohenMiller Design logo, the first two levels of headline styles are set in all-caps.
I use a Mac, and browse the web using Safari, so I have sort of aimed the design to look great in that browser and FireFox. Internet Explorer doesn’t support some of the styling techniques that I have used in this site, so if you are using that browser, for this and other sites and reasons, I strongly recommend downloading FireFox, Safari or Opera.
