Introducing LegiStyles™

Posted on February 2, 2009February 2, 2009 Posted in Apple, Design, Technology, TypographyTagged CSS, graphic design, legibility, readability, reader, rss, style, Typography8 Comments

As some of you already know, I use NetNewsWire for all my feed reading duties. It’s an amazing desktop applications that offers a ton of great features including synchronization. One of the great advantages of using NNW is that you can use custom CSS styles on your feeds.

There are a bunch of styles out there that are good but they all kind of look the same and most of them don’t focus on typography and readability. I’m trying to fill this void with what I like to call LegiStyles™, a series of custom NNW styles I’ve created that focus on design and typography. Best of all they’re free.

As of now I have 4 styles available but I plan to add more over time. If you don’t use NNW, I highly recommend it. If you do, head over to the site and download a style or two.

I’ve setup an RSS feed as a way to keep informed on news and updates. For all you Twitter users, follow LegiStyles for updates and also reply with any feedback using @legistyles.

Enjoy.

NetNewsWire Style 2.5

Posted on November 2, 2008February 2, 2009 Posted in Apple, Design, Technology, TypographyTagged feed, graphic design, netnewswire, reader, rss, style, Typography, widows17 Comments

Version 2.5 of my NetNewsWire style is now available. The design is simple and clean with a great deal of focus on typography and legibility. In this new version I’ve made some improvements that will enhance the reading experience.

Another enhancement that I was hoping to implement was a consistent vertical baseline. But because of inconsistencies within RSS feeds it was very difficult to accomplish, probably even impossible. For example in certain feeds blocks of copy are not wrapped in the paragraph tag, instead just use the break tag. For this reason it’s hard to control the text and elements like images.

Anyhow, I’m very exited about the features I was able to add.

New Features in Version 2.5

Widows
Prevention of typographic widows in titles and body copy via jQWidon’t.
Capitalization
All words in title are capitalized.
Image Resize
Images wider than 600px are resized to fit the fixed width of the style.

Special thanks to Oliver Boermans for helping me with some bugs.

To install just double click the file.

Download NNW Style 2.5

A Redesign is a Comin’

Posted on September 4, 2008September 5, 2008 Posted in DesignTagged Design, layout, style, theme, Typography, wordpress46 Comments

UPDATE

I just flipped the switch and moved everything over so it should all be done. Let me know if you find anything that looks weird, especially those of you on a PC. Enjoy.

Yup… again. I’m starting to grow out of this current design. I need something more flexible with more real estate for the posts and for side widgets. Better typography and usability as well.

You’ll notice that I’ve also begun to prepare the most recent posts to work with the new design. I’m setting some visual standards. A slight change in how I write out the headlines. Previously I use to capitalize all the words in a title including “a”, “the”, “of”, “is”, “on” and so on. Now I’m using a form of Title Casing where the first and last words in the title are capitalized as well as any word four or more letters. I’m also setting an image height of 700px for consistency. You’ll see what I mean when I launch the new design.

It’s pretty much done, I’m just making some final tweaks and I’ll probably flip the switch tomorrow evening. I hope you guys dig it.

NetNewsWire Style Version 2.0

Posted on May 8, 2008February 2, 2009 Posted in Design, TechnologyTagged feed, netnewswire, reader, rss, style19 Comments

Yesterday I updated the style I created for the RSS reader NetNewsWire to version 2.0. It’s a complete overhaul from version 1.0 with a new design.

Version 1.0 had some issues with displaying articles containing multiple images which forced me to create a second style that could handle this. Switching between two styles wasn’t really convenient so I set out to fix this. This new version can handle articles with any type of content, which is what the first version should have accomplished.

Version 2.0 features a design very similar to this blog, extending the visual experience of the site into your RSS reader. It’s simple, clean and easy to read.

I’ve tested the style in NNW 3.0 but it should work in older versions as well.

To install just double click the file.

Download NNW Style 2.0

Vote For Me!

Posted on January 12, 2008January 12, 2008 Posted in Design, Grid Systems, TypographyTagged book, Design, graphic, international, layout, minimalism, modernism, style, typographic, Typography5 Comments

Coversourcing

I just finished designing this cover for the Coversourcing competition. If you dig it, head over to the site and vote for my design!

I wanted to do something very simple and clean but with an effective image. The image is from a larger image that I purchased from istockphoto.com, and of course, I used Helvetica and a grid system.

Coversourcing is a competition from Random House and Creative Review to design the cover of Crowdsourcing, WIRED editor Jeff Howe’s upcoming book about the new internet revolution driven by the masses.

UPDATE
Unfortunately I just found out that to be eligible, you have to be a resident of the UK or Ireland. That really blows. Not sure why they would limit the competition like this but it was still fun to design to it. Vote anyway, maybe we can change their minds.

NetNewsWire Style

Posted on November 15, 2007February 2, 2009 Posted in Design, TechnologyTagged feed, grids, netnewswire, rss, style4 Comments

Recently I’ve started using a great RSS reader called NetNewsWire that makes managing and reading my 50+ feeds much easier and efficient. The one problem I have with it are the styles that are bundled with the app. Some of them are nice but most of them are hard to look at. They also all use pretty the same boring layout. Title, feed info, content, all in a row. So I figured I’d try to make one and see how it comes out and I can honestly say that I like it. I used a grid system to design it so it has a nice structure.

The one issue with it though is that it breaks if there are multiple images in the feed. Works great when there is one image or no image but once there are multiple, they all lay on top of each other so you only see the first image. To fixed this I made a second style titled AisleOne Multiple that alters the layout a bit to compensate for this problem. So you set your style to AisleOne Single and when you get an article with multiple images you change it to AisleOne Multiple. It’s a terrible solution and I’m going to continue working on it. I need to figure out a way for the CSS to see that there are multiple images in the feed and set a different style in that instance. If anyone has any ideas on this, please let me know. Also if you have any issues with the styles just post a comment and I’ll try and fix it.

I’ve only tested it in the new 3.0 version. To install just double click the files.

Download NNW Styles