A Preview of how I am spending my summer vacation…

Freeway
1

I constantly build document “templates” for myself-- starting points with my favorite or best (current) practice inflow construction elements and styles. Here’s a preview of my latest-- while I’m not yet ready to release it into the wild, I do intend to do so at some point and thought perhaps introducing it now may generate some interesting discussion. Such as…

“Templates don’t work in Freeway because most people want to change them or work against them-- usually in ways that break them utterly and completely. This is fairly typical I think of most Freeway users. This desire for things to magically ‘work’ while at the same time being extremely customizable.”

http://cssway.thebigerns.com/projects/papier-preview/

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2

Hi Ernie,

to prevent this great list and approach and upcoming discussion from well meant but useless and ignorant:

“Great, can’t wait 'til you release it …”

allow me some notes:

####First things first:

I do love the way how you handle typography with care, brain, heart and attention to detail. This is unique in this landscape, showing your special power. This is design - at least one of the most important part of it.

####Templates in Freeway (or anywhere):

I’m one of the biggest foe of it and ever was and ever will (perhaps). Not by their existence, cause a framework is as well kinda template. And I do love frameworks and patterns. The way bigger problem is, that this leads amateurs to start with design, comparable to fill forms.

And that’s the entire wrong approach. A project starts by content! You can’t treat it like form-fields. And this is the magic breaker at all.

####The things I learned

Typography the way you do requires knowledge. As long as Freeway allowing us to fiddle styles within inspector, it’s a matter of five seconds to break well organized and so hard created proper styles. It’s something like:

“I want to change the blue color into green. Ah - found it, inspector yada yada”. Those lists usually start pretty harmless and end in … hm (https://freewaytalk.softpress.com/thread/view/164275#m_164279 just as an example).

Prevent yourself from this the best you can, we (and me specifically) urgently need you for more advanced things and stuff.

Oh did I already mentioned?

Great - can’t wait 'til you release it!

Cheers

Thomas

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3

Hi Ernie,

obviously and in an unwanted surprise coup, I destroyed your list. Apologize for this - it wasn’t my intention at all keeping people off the expected discussion.

Meanwhile, I adopted some of your things - especially the css columns. I never tried them so far but it’s pretty cool. The only thing with them is structuring text in blocks (or paragraphs) cause it could lead to empty first lines caused by the
. Or is there something I’m missing?

Cheers

Thomas

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obviously and in an unwanted surprise coup, I destroyed your list. Apologize for this - it wasn’t my intention at all keeping people off the expected discussion.

Nonsense… I have spent years driving people away by insisting that they learn to do brain surgery with a shovel. I’ve also driven the shovel-makers away by insisting they make their tool more brain-surgeoney. But it turns out that most people are just fine with shoveling things around with any spade-like thing they can find, so… no harm or foul my friend.

But since we are the only two on the planet in here, let’s talk shop.

Meanwhile, I adopted some of your things - especially the css columns. I never tried them so far but it’s pretty cool. The only thing with them is structuring text in blocks (or paragraphs) cause it could lead to empty first lines caused by the . Or is there something I’m missing?

No, CSS columns remain a mystery to me too-- mostly because of all the bits and pieces which are still evolving. There are extended properties but I still haven’t found the surest way to make them work. Here’s an article that helped me get this far:

I think what you are looking for is perhaps the column-fill property. There’s also some word-column-break, break before, after, properties I couldn’t quite get the hang of that you may have better luck than me. Also related is CSS hyphenation-- another tricky, evolving spec which may or may not be helpful in aiding the appearance of column “rag” ends.

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Hi Ernie,

yep - the link is exactly the one I followed too. However I haven’t read it carefully enough from top to bottom, so thanks for pointing me to it again.

Somehow it does the expected things. It is the column-fill (and the column-span for headings) which is of interest. Even images seem to work (however very critical to control).

An important thing is the p-Tag with a margin-bottom to structure the text.

But Firefox (the new IE to me) is making me concerned. Perhaps a lil fix for it:

Use

-moz-column-fill:balance

instead of

-moz-column-fill:auto

It’s not exactly the same, but better than nothing. My test: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8231701/cdn-digitalmedia-themes/theGridMaterialz/typography.html

Cheers

Thomas

Perhaps some more inspiration regarding css columns:

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Hi Ernie,

due a matter of fact that we’re in a safe space here, I think I can share this talk I actually found:

It somehow can extend our conversation here or anywhere (however I’m not entirely with her regarding columns).

But we should keep this between the two of us :slight_smile:

Cheers

Thomas

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7

Thanks for that video, Thomas-- that is very inspiring and frankly, I need inspiring just now.

But also, learned a couple new things to try on, and encouragement to go back to things already tried and discarded as too alien (like flex). Also, listening to her and seeing someone who is not so totally out of my league with similar thoughts and ideas that I can feel better in the morning mirror, as an OLD designer, as an OLD artist, as an OLD soldier who can still battle his way through the day’s projects to claim victory, no matter how small.

Some of this I have been thinking about anyway-- at least in regard to typography-- because there is so much more we can do these days than before.

I made this quick example for a different thread, but because of your video I dusted of some flex css for the rows and columns…

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27331610/colorcrazy/index.html

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