I had the pleasure of speaking at SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach this weekend. Thanks for all who attended; I had a great time speaking on some exciting new topics, and sharing my passion for design in SharePoint. For those of you who were at the seminar, and also for those who might be interested, I wanted to share my presentations on my two sessions:
On January 23-26, 2012, I’ll be instructing a class that focuses on the more advanced strategies behind applying style and branding to a SharePoint 2010 website. This isn’t your average SharePoint training class: we’ll cover topics like improving the SharePoint user experience, creative design for the SharePoint platform, and implementation strategy for making your creative designs come to life. Over four days, we’ll learn how to bend the rules in SharePoint to make it a truly limitless platform for customization.
“v5.master” is a simple HTML5 master page designed for SharePoint 2010. It makes good use of the amazing new features of both HTML5 and CSS3, including CSS3 media queries. The master page is extremely simplistic in nature, and is truly meant to serve as a framework for building your own SharePoint 2010 customizations.
As a designer of the world wide web, you are armed with the power to amaze, enlighten, entice, and captivate. The web is an easel for your creative aspirations, and the content you design for is the foundation of your creativity. With so much power at the tips of your fingers, you also possess the ability to deter, annoy, anger, and infuriate. Your users are yours to command, their emotions yours to pluck like the strings of a harp.
It’s easy to forget how a website really works. I mean really works. I’ve had the pleasure of working with many brilliant and talented developers (programmers) who could bend the functionality of any application or server-side platform at the drop of a hat. They are problem-solvers, as is everyone in this industry of the online.
You can now download my free SharePoint theme, Medazio, on SharePointDesigNerds.com. We’re still working on cleaning up the site while it’s in “draft” version, but feel free to sign up, browse a couple of the themes that we’ve uploaded, post your amazing SharePoint spotlights, and give us feedback on the design, navigation, and functionality in the site.
Responsive design is all the rage. Ethan Marcotte, just today, released a new book on the subject, of which I’m quite excited. My last post was all about responsive web design, and after writing the article, I couldn’t help but ask myself: what now? Designing and implementing experiences for an unknown number of devices can be an intimidating task, especially when you don’t have the opportunity to test your designs on many (or any) of them. The answer, for me, was to create a new web app that aids in this testing process. It’s called Screenfly, and it’s the first of many apps that will be available on QuirkTools.com.
The days of the desktop are numbered. In the past, designing a web interface involved targeting a screen resolution in the vicinity of 960 pixels wide. For many years, this worked, and it worked well, because 99% of online users could easily read and scroll at that resolution, regardless of the browser, operating system, or machine they were using. Times have changed.
I’ve done some crazy things to make SharePoint work like I want it to. One of the things that I’ve done in the past is write some insanely complex XSLT functions to format dates in SharePoint 2007 item styles. SharePoint 2007 offered a very useful FormatDate feature of the DDWRT XSL library, but the formatting customization was limited to picking a prefab format, which didn’t always gel with what you or your client wanted to see. To get some custom date formats, I wrote crazy XSLT functions that literally had
A most difficult aspect of customizing the SharePoint 2010 interface is the arduous task of overriding the thousands of styles that Microsoft has already put in place for anything and everything that you see in the browser window. This can be a tedious task, to say the least. Largely, the SharePoint interface doesn’t rely on the cascading facet of Cascading Style Sheets. Instead, most of the elements that you see in SharePoint 2010 (like web parts, navigation menus, lists, libraries, page editor styles, etc.) all have specific CSS styles that specify font size, color, and even the font family. In a more traditional HTML/CSS structure, you begin your presentation alterations with a default style that cascades throughout the entire HTML document, like so: