Well its been a very long and troubling few months but I’m back in action so to speak. The template design series was almost placed on the back burner had it not been for some generous help from members over at CSS Creator helping me clean up much of the code.
CSS for layouts is very important now days and any site that isn’t XHTML compliant is generally frowned on by designers and developers alike. The issue with CSS isn’t really an issue its a compliance adherence and like programming, individual style and programming practices vary from one coder to the next. Most of my code is in this template series is pretty standardized and familiar to nearly any CSS designer in the market. So general and organized is the code that it’s clear my objective was to avoid controversy and critique while providing good solid XHTML based code for the series.
In the years I’ve been a designer I’ve had the benefit of being a teacher as well and I’ve been able to see first hand much of the code from many designers around the world and its interesting to note that certain fundamentals never seem to die and good common practices are persistent characteristics of good coding regardless of individual style. This RTDS really coins on good well versed and common coding practices where CSS layouts are concerned. I frequently and quite actively use the “Clear Fix” technique presented by Tony from www.csscreator.com in a good portion of the master layout foundations and I frequently use very common and very basic styling methods in use today without going into exhaustively involved code. When I say exhaustive involved code I mean the styling of things not common in most templates and layouts. Things like tables and or forms for example are void in nearly all the template foundation masters included in the kit and I’ve taken a great deal of time and patience to make sure that things are easy to follow and understand by example. After all, the RTDS is an instructional series for students of design, not a professional developer / designer resource as I may have eluded to in the past by mistake.
When the kit publishes, the price will reflect the fact that some of the original project objectives had to be removed in order to accommodate a mass appeal and because of such will likely be about $39.95. Previously we had planned on variants starting at that price and topping out around $149.95 as the project flooded over into its 5th CD along with the printed font guide and other supplemental documents. With the help of Mark Panavia I’ve managed to reduce the overall size of the course series to about 3 CD’s or a single DVD reducing cost and time.
All of the photoshop actions for template building and the supplementals for design fundamentals was also updated to accommodate photoshop beginning at version 8 up to current CS3 releases. Most of the actions were tested in version 7 as well but should not be counted on as a the ideal version for use with this kit.
I’ll get back to publishing some basic materials tomorrow morning and then hopefully get this production live and ready to roll. Now that we are going to self publish it should be a lot less demanding in the support realm since I and my partners know the product well enough to draft good support material in the new forum.