I’ve finally finished off my second submission to the CSS Zen Garden, and its been accepted! I’ve been wanting to have another go, and do something more comtemporary, but I really felt the pressure after recent entries. Release One, sub:lime and si6 have all been beautiful examples of slick modern design.
One of the hardest things is coming up with a decent name. I originally wanted to call this one ‘Design Wankery’, but I settled for the more subdued ‘dusk’ instead. You’ll see what I mean.
Rather than sit down and plan this one, I spent a while getting the text in a position I liked, and then added the eye candy around it. It very slowly evolved over the space of a couple of months (whereas my last entry took 2 evenings). In the end I had to draw a line and decide not to tickle it any further. Because the page is marked up with lots of extra tags for flexibility, I had to fight the urge to try and do something ‘clever’ with all of them. That’s just not what the Zen Garden is all about.
Finally- here’s the honesty bit. The layout isn’t perfect in Opera 6. I’ve used overflow:auto to scroll the main text, which means that a height value must be declared. Opera 6 will display all the text without scrollbars, but still assumes that its still as high as you’ve declared it. This means that the links list doesn’t run on and appears on top of the main text.