My most recent paying enterprise has been the design of a Web site for the Association of Bainbridge Communities. (For those to whom this might mean something, the ABC is the organization that puts out Scotch Broom.) Its precise purpose is as yet unclear, but this is what one expects when one works with committees.

I’ve set up hosting for the ABC (they insisted on abcbi.org, a domain I must admit I consider a bit unintuitive), and have completed five variations on a theme that I plan on submitting for consideration tomorrow. I do admit that I am stuck in a design rut — these mockups bear striking similarity to CERTIFIED Jeans and Pygmy Software, my last two projects — but I’m not convinced that’s all bad. I rather like this rut, you could say. It’s a good rut. The kind of rut about which you can say, “Now, that’s a good rut.”

Anyway, if any of my far-reaching and staggeringly inclusive readership is so inclined, please check out the mockups and let me know if you like any, dislike any, and, if you’re feeling generously wordy, why. Is there anything I’m doing totally wrong? Anything that I should absolutely not do away with? Is the guinea pig a rodent (17.4MB PDF)? Is boredom lethal when combined with obsession? What’s with certain Germans and ducks?

Now, dear readers, is your chance to make a lasting mark on your world. Don’t pass it by.

I’m coming just to the end of another exciting and fulfilling consulting job. For some reason, I have taken to naming my jobs using my clients’ last names. Thus, this is the Davison job.

The Davison job is a straightforward web design project for a company known as CERTIFIED Jeans, a small Seattle-based company that manufactures jeans from organic cotton in the United States. Although I’m not one to buy new clothing on a regular basis, they’ve got to be a better choice than your generic McSweatShop Jeans International.

I chose a design that I’d like to flatter myself to think is utilitarian and simplistic, yet eye-catching in a way. I didn’t so much adhere to standards, but it seems to render well rather universally. If you’re in for a thrill and fright, check out their previous design.

This job as been exceptionally enjoyable and satisfying. This may be because of its sharp contrast with most of my web design jobs — content was provided early and clearly, and a function for the site was already in mind. Another element was that I got to work with people who were not only friendly and helpful, but were also startlingly appreciative. By this I don’t mean that they paid well (although they did), but they were surreally enthusiastic about my work, which was good for stroking the ol’ ego and also for motivation.

One odd side-effect of working on the Davison job has to do with the fact that my client used my camera to capture the photos that now grace the site. As usual, I used iPhoto to import the photos, and now my iPhoto library contains eighty-five-odd pictures of… pants. I feel weird.

The job has been an excellent one, and I’d be lucky to have any more like it.

I’ve been working on some simple JavaScript for driving tabs in order to replace some frustratingly inflexible code that seems quite selective in the browsers it chooses to work with. The new code is called Mook-Fu.

So far, Mook-Fu has been tested in:

• Safari 1.0 (KHTML)
• Mozilla (Mozilla 1.5, Firebird 0.7, Camino 0.7)
• MacIE 5.2.2
• WinIE 5.0
• Galleon
• Netscape 7.1
• Netscape Communicator 4.8 (does not work)

I’d enjoy greatly to use <p> tags here on Capra hircus. It seems not only like the “right thing” to do, but also that it would make things a mite easier to edit. I’ve been using the <br /><br /> construction to separate paragraphs in my posts as a rule because I’ve got a nice little border around each post. For some reason, if there exists a gap between my content and its bounding box, I feel sickly, my hands begin to shake, and my eyes can’t quite focus on anything. That and and I always seem to crave licorice Jelly Bellies. Or something.

The problem arises because block-level elements (like p) usually come packaged with a couple of standard margins: 1em at the top and 1em at the bottom. These, of course, make perfect sense; paragraphs need to be separated from each other. However, this creates what I believe is an inadvertent problem (or, if you’re that dramatic, a necessary evil). The same 1em gaps appear at the beginning and end of a string of block-level elements.

So my question to the ether goes something like this: Is there some way, with CSS, perhaps, that I can tell an element to ignore the margins of the first and last block-level elements contained within it? It’s most likely that either (a) I’m missing something unbearably obvious, or (b) it can’t be done.

Now go listen. (via Irate Scotsman)