ERIK KRAFT | About the Design

A NOTE ON THE DESIGN

Classic Penguin covers. (Larger version.)

ODE TO A PENGUIN

I designed this site as a tribute to the classic Penguin paperback covers of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. The basic Penguin design was introduced when the Penguin line debuted in 1935 and revolutionized the publishing industry by offering inexpensive, well-designed books to the British public. In the late 40s, the eminent typographer Jan Tschichold joined Penguin and perfected this basic design, creating the archetypal Penguin cover (examples at left). They are characterized by their strong horizontal grid design, bold use of color, modern typography, and, of course, the lovably awkward hand-drawn penguin logo. In the 50s, Tschichold created another classic design: the vertical grid cover (below).

To my mind, the Penguin paperback is the perfect marriage of form and function. The classic Penguin cover embodies the values I strive for in my own design work: boldness, clarity, elegance, and a bit of playfulness.

Tschichold's vertical grid design. (Larger version.)

ALL THE -ILITIES: ACCESSIBILITY, USABILITY, FLEXIBILITY

A strong visual presentation is important to me, but so are accessibility, usability, and flexibility. I designed this site to have no tradeoffs between aesthetics and these utterly important -ilities. If you take a look at the code of any of these pages, you'll see standards-compliant, semantically meaningful XHTML. The content of the pages is separated from the visual presentation using cascading style sheets. The pages are designed to degrade gracefully. Browsing with images or CSS turned off? No problem--you'll still be able to navigate the site and view the structured underlying text. Javascript disabled? You can still view full size versions of the thumbnails in this image gallery. Want to print a copy of my resume? An alternate style sheet for print media creates a printer-friendly version on the fly. I have closely studied cutting-edge CSS and XHTML design techniques for the past two years, and now have at my disposal a toolbox of skills that allows me to create sites that are lightweight, visually elegant and typographically rich without sacrificing accessibility, usability, or flexibility.