You’ll notice I have a brand spanking new layout as mentioned in my sideblog. Its by no means perfect, I started work on it last night, stopped at 2am and started again at 12 this morning and ‘finished’ at 8oclock this evening. In time for triple CSI :D
One thing that is increasingly annoying to me as a web designer (if you can call me that!) is now not only do I have to worry about cross browser coding compatibility in Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE6 and 7 (in none of which is this site perfect yet might I add) but I now also have to worry about colour profiles.
When I made my previous layout it looked great in photoshop (colour wise - heh), but as soon as I saved it and previewed it in firefox the colours were dull and lifeless. I tried gif, jpg and png all looked rubbish, except in safari, the colours were perfect, just how I’d made them. In the end I changed the design completely just because of the drastic colour changes FF was making to my images.
This is an example of my new layout in Safari. You may or may not be able to see it, but on my screen the colour changes are pretty drastic. This is something I’ve been doing a bit of research on over the past few weeks.
Wikipedia gives you the gist of it:
In PC video, images are encoded with a gamma of about 0.45 and decoded with a gamma of 2.2; in Mac systems, the corresponding typical values are 0.55 and 1.8.
It was when I read about sRGB color space though that I got thinking, Photoshop is always nagging me about colour profiles when I open some images and I twigged why not change the colour profile of the images and thats what I did.
tada! All I did was untick the option to embed a colour profile to fix the safari display problem. The image isn’t as bright but it looks so much nicer blending in with the background don’t you think!?
In essence gamma is a measurement of how intense the colour of the pixels are. I’m sure there’s better ways of describing it but I’m not an expert. If your interested in finding out more about gamma have a look at some of these links: Gamma Correction, Gamma FAQ, sRGB. They gave me an idea of what the hell gamma was!
*drools* I love the whole Web 2.0 effect you’ve got going on. I would personally make the sideblog links a lighter shade of magenta though. It could be just my MacBook’s glossy screen, but it seems a little dark.
Thanks for the tip about the colour profiles. I’ve had some troubles with colouring on different browsers as well, so this will definitely come in handy.
This is by far one of my new favourite layouts on the internet. It’s really simple but the header area is magnificent! I suck at design in Photoshop so I just make incredibly simple layouts and make up for the lack of design by coding fluid layouts. :P
The only thing that I’ve noticed about this layout that I don’t like is the the size of your comment text. It’s small and strains my eyes when I read it. I can do it, but it hurts. Perhaps make it just a size bigger? I’m sure I’m not the only one who has problems reading small text. Other than that, this layout rocks!
I’m an IE7 user and your search bar goes under the navigation.
A screenshot:
http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/5373/dcleil6.png
You know, I always wondered why some sites I visit looked screwed up. I’d see someone’s header image and you could see the outline of the image and that it didn’t match right with their background and i would think “why don’t they fix that? how lazy!” but now I’m guessing it’s just the profiles thing. Interesting!
How interesting, but to bad that they can’t just make things more simple! I love the new lay btw, I always like yours because they are unique you don’t just use celebrities.
When I used to have my website that problem always happened to me! But only when I used browns. I only found that to bother me when I used brown!
Thanks for looking into it, now I know if I ever get my domain back n the future. Its been atleast a year lol.