one bee - August 2008

Fri, August 29

Get Your Grids!

New TV shows are coming and you wouldn't want to be caught unawares. Stock up with informative schedules and speculative analysis. (Read more.)

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Tue, August 26

McSweeney's #28

The gang serves up a tray full of short stories, ranging from charming to bizarre (to both). (Read more.)

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Mon, August 25

Next time, I'd like to see NBC and the IOC join forces and swap the levels of hype, coverage, and pyrotechnics between the Olympics and the Paralympics. Give the Paralympics the first spot on the schedule, too. You don't even have to tell anybody; just swap one for the other. My bet is, spectators – who have never heard of 90% of the competitors in either case – won't even blink. And NBC's background research staff will sleep easier. Finally, some triumph-over-adversity stories that write themselves!

Either that or bring back the Laff-A-Lympics. Someone get on this.

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Wed, August 20

The Orientation of the Grays—12:36 PM

Is there such a thing as too much grey? Granted, the writing on onebee usually dwells in various grey areas, but from a design standpoint, a little grey goes a long way. Amidst onebee's traditional late-summer minor redesign, I've been updating the photo pages (which never got updated to match last year's redesign) and making a few other small changes.

While I was at it, I decided to finally take a look at the site's sprawling style sheet – the code which specifies colors and layout for text and other items on the site. As designs have been added or changed, I haven't always taken the time to integrate them with existing styles, which means there are probably multiple separate descriptions for "small text" or "text with expanded margin." And there are far, far too many versions of "grey."

We use a lot of grey at onebee, because aside from the Beeie logo and the "beeline" we're pretty desaturated. The text speaks for itself and photos add the occasional splash of color. Grey helps separate one kind of information from another, or outlines something without giving it a hard, sharp edge. And as new grey things were added, they weren't always integrated with existing styles. So I dug into it, and found that the site was using 28 separate shades of grey! (Not counting the two tan-greys that fill the background of the site and the little navigation bar atop each page.)

In some instances, it was clearly out of hand. Some of the greys are so close together, they can't be distinguished by the naked eye. For example, one item would be E5E5E5 while another would be E6E6E6 . We'd have one 666666 and one 686868. What's the point of that?

So I slashed it back, combined greys where possible, and now we're down to a much more manageable 11 greys. (And some of those are in key areas like the comments or Buzzworthy, where minor shifts are necessary for contrast.) I don't know about you, but I feel better.

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Tue, August 5