About Us
A short introduction to Continuum Design
The people.
As I have mentioned before, Continuum Design is my wife Heather and myself, Trevor. We are two designers with regular day jobs and a desire to create the next great visual solution, for the web, in print and on the tip of our customers’ tongues. We’re motivated by everything around us, from ‘60s music to contemporary movie posters. The world is an inspiration, and we use every inch of it.
The site.
The second version of continuumdesign.net is built entirely upon web standards. Many web designers continue to use transitional doctypes, and while they get the job done, I wanted to challenge myself and write pages that conformed to the XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype. No particular reason other than I’m a standardista wanna–be. I’ve always felt that if you are going to do something, you might as well do it right. So I immersed myself in HTML, CSS and Javascript. By the power of Google I have come to appreciate unobtrusive scripting, accessibility and semantic markup. The result is what you see here.
The layout.
I really love some of the “new” design styles out there. I won’t insult you with buzzwords, you’ve already heard them a thousand times already. Good design is good design, regardless of darling pet names. But for our site, Heather and I wanted to keep the user interface simple. By deliberately creating a minimal site, we can focus on keeping our visitors engaged with real content and not visual fluff. First and foremost, design is a vehicle for communication. Less clutter equals greater retention of the message.
The tools.
This entire site has been crafted by hand, with an epic amount of geek devotion. I fabricate all of my code with Textmate and a slightly crusty Mac G4. First—generation G4. It is slow and due to be replaced with a speedy new Macintel, but the wedding has taken a much higher precedence in matters of money. Besides, there is something sentimental about your first computer. No matter how many times you have cursed it’s creators for turtle slow rendering, you find it very difficult to upgrade. Maybe it’s the price tag. Or maybe it’s just nostalgia...
I also got really technical and compiled Apache 2.2.x and PHP 5.1.5
to test my hare–brained scripts in a controlled environment. There might be a better
way to learn PHP and regex form validation than endless
echo $WTF_textarea statements, but I have yet to find it.
The future.
Pretty simple really. Keep learning Javascript and experimenting with unobtrusive deployment. And learn Ruby on Rails. I’ve gone through the trouble to compile the pieces from source, now I just need to use them more often. There will come a day, (hopefully sooner than later) that this site will have a custom content management system and blog, all built with Ruby on Rails. I briefly detoured into the world of Python and Django, but couldn’t get the damn database coupler to compile. If a framework won’t communicate with your database, what good is it, exactly? I can probably chalk that one up to operator error, but Rails works fine, so it will be my framework for the immediate future. Stay tuned for blog posts and/or rants about my progress.
