Bite Size Vitamin
A web developer’s life is a merry ol’ life. It just got even merrier with the unveiling of two great new resources.
Bite Size Standards is the brainchild of John Oxton. It’s a collaborative effort put together by a lot of very talented people. The site provides quick, easy to digest nuggets of wisdom for the princely sum of no cost whatsoever.
Vitamin is also providing free, valuable information. Also a product of collaboration, it’s the newest champion from the stables of Carson Systems. The first issue has set the bar high with some excellent articles: be sure to read Mike Rundle’s great article on visual design for the web.
Eric Meyer has also written a great piece for the inaugural issue called Making Popular Layout Decisions. It touches on a lot of the issues that I raised in my recent post about polarisation of opinion. In a nutshell: there are no absolutely right or wrong decisions. The classic example that Eric cites is the ol’ fixed/liquid conundrum (although he does oversimplify things somewhat when he says of liquid layouts, “users with really wide windows will get really long lines of text, which most people find difficult to read” — it ain’t necessarily so, although this is true of the many poorly-implemented liquid designs out there).
The Vitamin site itself is a wonderful example of compromise in that area. It looks equally great at 800 pixels, 1024 pixels, or any other arbitrary browser width. It always give me a warm glow to see such detailed attention paid to the user’s needs.
The visual design is also very appealing. It kind of reminds me of old-school Evolt mixed with K10K, updated for the standards-savvy crowd.
If you take your Bite Size Standards and your Vitamin and wash it down with the always wonderful A List Apart (a triple issue is out this week), you’ve got the perfect balanced diet of web design resources.
And if you don’t like any of them, you can always demand your money back.