Sometimes the eye knows
It’s eminently possible to be too clever for one’s own good.
I did a slick little trick for Info Arch client’s site involving turning a thick border into an ersatz navigation bar via relative-positioning the list of links. After much futzing, finally got it working a treat. (Except in Firebird on Win98. Still don’t know what the heck was up with that.)
The problem was that the bar was so thick it had become the dominant visual element on the page, quite overshadowing the (very slick—I can say this because I didn’t design it) logo and the nice swooshy sidebar.
This, one of my groupmates pointed out to me gently, was not good.
Well, okay, I can slim the bar a bit… maybe cut the font size… wait a minute. This is silly. Start over. Start OVER.
Five seconds later, I’d dumped the border and the relative positioning and redone the bar with thin top and bottom borders and the same unobtrusive background color as the navigation sidebar. Much, much better-looking and more reliable, though oozing much less cleverness.
Hey. Maybe the gray instead of the green for the borders there, since the page is so green-heavy… I’ll see. Either way, less cleverness meant a better-looking page.
Eventually I shall be clever again, I’m sure. Fear me…