During January I’ve been working with Johnny Van Haeften to create a site for the forth coming summer exhibition ‘Master Paintings Week London‘, featuring works from London’s top top paintings dealers in London’s Mayfair and St. James’s.
During a recent project I decided to implement an image gallery using jQuery for visual effects. I needed a series of thumbnails that would be clickable to update a full size image using nice fade transitions.
Some Googling unearthed Galleria which looked promising, though upon testing and deploying to a remote site I found it to be a little slow and there were some incompatibility issues with Safari.
I decided to create an simplified version to cut out the overheads and hopefully speed things up. This relies on a simple HTML <ul> list with embedded thumbnails with title tags to be used for captions - and for the full image a <div> container.
I’ve often spent time developing column structures for websites. Structure is a good thing and it’s essential to keep your design looking consistent across a number of website pages. Newspapers all run on complex column grid systems and have done for years. Websites are really no different. Even if you have an irregular design, you’ll still benefit from a little underlying structure.
The following shows one of the more common column structures, with splits for 2 to 6 equally spaced columns. It’s based on a 720 pixel width, so will sit nicely on 800×600.
There are a number of other column sets that split nicely into whole (pixel) numbers. Read on if you’re interested.