The making of Galveston

I am just about the happiest man alive at present, sitting in Starbucks without a Treo, without an iBook, and without a single MP3. I’m here with a coffee, fountain pen, and notebook, writing for the sheer relaxation of casually marking the paper with brown ink. (This is exactly what Adrian Frutiger talked about in his book: type is made by taking away the light to make a mark, not vice versa like so many other forms of art.)

I will probably type this up once I return home simply to stick to my posting schedule, not because I actually want to. Even though I have two other design projects waiting for me, they can be patient. I don’t want to see XHTML/CSS for a few days. Why the change of face? Why, Galveston was created.

Since I left my statistics discussion on Friday, I’ve been in the Daily almost constantly. Due to the fact that the Daily website, the one I had promised everyone would be improved this year, still hasn’t materialised, I’ve lost almost all credibility within the Managing Desk as well as with other Daily employees. It’s honestly quite amazing how much people will say when they’re drunk, and from what I was being told incessantly on Friday at the Daily party, I’ve been a rather useless online editor, and my constant blaming of New Digital Group for slow support is seen as nothing more than an age-old excuse.

My term as Managing Online Editor has been rather depressing. The previous editor left me with no staff and no training, so I pretty much had to learn from scratch how the newspaper operated. Once I had everything working properly – which took at least 12-20 hours a week until June – I finally got to work on design.

I outsourced the preliminary design to a hyaline media member and got to work learning Smarty, the templating system that New Digital Group uses. Over the summer, I got roughly 140 of nearly 600 template files done.

Once school was back in session, though, half of my staff quit due to collegiate reasons, leaving me picking up the Edit slack along with my associate editor, Angela. The administrative issues left the new template on the back burner. After a few weeks, I ran a few wanted ads and split Online into Online Edit and Online Design, leaving Angela to run Edit with an expanded staff and me to do what I was best at. I hired a few designers and a good PHP developer.

I eventually decided that we needed an interim design to push users in the direction that we needed to go creatively; before we plastered our 16,000,000 page views a month with Web 2.0-like UI, content, and layout, we needed something to wean people onto web standards. This left us without the choice to build an entire template from scratch. I picked up a skeleton template from New Digital Group, met my design staff that evening, and the concept for Galveston was born. We set the milestone in Basecamp for October 28.

Since we didn’t really need a whole lot of PHP firepower, my associate online designer, Phil Dokas, and I took the template into our own hands. I left the administrative base and jumped into the coding trenches, flexing some Smarty, XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript muscle. I left Phil to CSS layout – a formidable task for a page that still supports browsers as old as IE Mac – and tackled creative direction, CSS typography and colour, XHTML, Smarty templating, and, finally, an implementation of sIFR.

On Saturday, I woke up after the Daily party and sat in front of my PC for thirteen hours, going on a coding marathon to build a personalised, standards-compliant template. By 3 am, I still hadn’t finished my sIFR implementation, but I needed sleep. I woke up this morning to get back to work. After some time in Flash, I installed sIFR, using the same serifs on-site as are used in the paper. Phil and I then spent more hours getting his layout to work cross-browser (and my sIFR to play nice with floating <div>s.) After IE Mac, IE6, Safari, Firefox, Flock, and Opera gave the page the OK, I sent an e-mail to New Digital Group to make the template live. My clock read 20:24. I also added a little article on web standards, the first thing I’ve actually written for the Daily and been credited as writing.

Finally, Galveston is done.

It’s clean, but it’s still based upon a generic skeleton template, so it doesn’t do a lot and is most definitely not built on the grid. That’s okay, though- this is just a temporary template, and if our temporary is using XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and sIFR, well… I’ll just let you imagine what we have in store for the next one.

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