Organ sheet music by Dr Alan Gray | Elegy

Organ sheet music by Henry Holloway | Allegretto Grazioso

How to use the right responsive grid and UI layout based on your design goals.

This past week has brought a few announcements from browser vendors of some exciting things that might have a big impact on CSS layout.

Weird and wonderful books judged on their covers and titles.

‘A bona fide football man…Whelan should be celebrated’ The Independent

Few figures in British business or sport have enjoyed Dave Whelan’s success. As a footballer he played in all four divisions. As a businessman he created one the country’s leading high street brands. And as chairman of Wigan Athletic he’s taken his club all the way from the Third Division to the Premiership.

Dave’s story is one of ambition, enterprise and tenacity – but also of a fierce loyalty. It begins in wartime Wigan with the Whelans’ desperate struggle to survive. Dave describes the terrifying wasp-like hum of the Luftwaffe; he remembers the deathly winter of 1942, peeing on his hands to stop his fingers from freezing; admits how hunger drove ordinary families to lie, cheat and steal; and relives a remarkable reunion with the father he’d never known – a returning soldier.

In peacetime a boyhood love affair with football leads him to sign with Blackburn Rovers and when national service calls he joins the Army football team, becoming close friends with ‘Busby Babes’ Bobby Charlton and Duncan Edwards.

Then, a vicious tackle in the 1960 FA Cup final spells the twilight of his playing career – but a new dawn in business. Starting as a market trader, he breaks the mould from day one: taking on Boots single-handedly in the Appeal Court; negotiating the sale of his supermarket chain to Ken Morrison – whilst stood at a urinal; and transforming a single tackle shop in Wigan into JJB Sports, the UK’s biggest sports retailer and a £1 billion PLC.

In 1995 he used his personal fortune to buy struggling, hometown Wigan Athletic, vowing to take the Latics all the way to the Premier League. At the time he was ridiculed, but ten years later, on the final day of the Championship, Dave watched, ecstatic, as his club beat Reading 3-1 to finally secure their place.

Sometimes tragic, frequently controversial and always heartfelt, Playing to Win lifts the lid on a life lived on the pitch and in the boardroom and tells how a hungry kid from Wigan’s backstreets became a national success and a local hero. Whelan's story was a great success in hardback, turning him into a local hero and now with the new release in paperback, Playing to Win offers football fans and general readers another chance to catch this engaging read.

Dave Whelan was the founder of retailer JJB Sports and is the chairman of Wigan Athletic Football Club. All the author’s profits will go to the new Wigan Boys and Girls Club

Playing to Win is available to buy in paperback now in local bookstores and online via the following link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dave-Whelan-Playing-Win-Autobiography/dp/1845135792/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1284559060&sr=8-2

Ray Harryhausen's Fantasy Scrapbook by Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton

November saw the release of Ray Harryhausen's Fantasy Scrapbook, a compendium of models, storyboards and concept drawings from the legendary pioneer of stop-motion animation. This new book is compiled from a wide range of never-before-seen artefacts from Ray's life and career, many of them only recently discovered in a Los Angeles garage. Through his original sketches, scripts and letters, it offers fascinating insights into the mind of one of Hollywood's great animators.

With informative introductions to each film and detailed captions for every image, this illuminating volume is a must for all film fans. Harryhausen's seminal work on Jason and the Argonauts, The 7th Joyage of Sinbad and Clash of the Titans remains hugely influential and Ray Harryhausen's Fantasy Scrapbook does his creativity and imagination justice.

"Thoroughly engrossing, whether you’re a Harryhausen fan or just a film fan in general. It’s an absolute delight to browse through and, crucially, captures the character of the man behind the monsters" sfx.co.uk

"This collection truly is a thing of beauty ... A must buy for Ray's fans" Starburst Magazine

Ray Harryhausen's Fantasy Scrapbook is available to buy here.


If the Fantasy Scrapbook has animated your interest and you're looking for more stop-motion history, then look no further. Aurum have published three more books by Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton:

The Art of Ray Harryhausen by Ray Harryhuasen and Tony Dalton, with a foreword by Peter Jackson

"A splendid volume... fabulous illustrations" Jonathan Ross

Available in paperback here.






Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life by Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton, with an foreword by Ray Bradbury

"A sumptuous account of the veteran animator's life on celluloid" The Independent

Available in paperback here.




A Century of Model Animation: From Méliès to Aardman by Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton

"A work full of love for the subject" SFX Magazine

Available in hardback here.

“While we had paid employee salaries in full for the months of March and April, I am afraid that we are left with no option but to implement the originally announced pay-cuts from the month of May 2020,” CEO Ronojoy Dutta told staff in a letter. Dutta said the leave would range from 1.5 to 5 days and would’t impact level A or the bottom rung of employees.

Air India employee unions have moved the Bombay High Court against the airline's decision to slash allowances, which form a major part of salary, by ten per cent because of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

A fun filled trip to Peru and Colombia.

Lakshmi Manchu's London holiday....

She was 75.

A look at the winners.

A day after the trailer release of his magnum opus Sye Raa Narasimha Reddy, Chiranjeevi celebrated his 64th birthday.

The first Dadasaheb Phalke International Film Festival was held in Hyderabad on September 20, and it honoured quite a few film folk.

With Kangana Ranaut bringing former Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalitha's life on screen, the rest of the casting is falling into place.

As Rajinikanth turns 69 on December 12, his family and friends took to social media to wish him. They posted pictures of the superstar and wrote touching notes.

The shooting started in Mumbai with a pooja ceremony.

After the huge success of the historical Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior, Ajay Devgn has moved on to his next.

Contrary to reports about Ajay Devgn charging S S Rajamouli a huge fee for his guest appearance in RRR...

Ananya Pandey has bagged a role opposite the Arjun Reddy hero in his next film, directed by Puri Jagannadh.

Director SS Rajamouli's latest film RRR is turning into an impossibly expensive project.

'Many generations have braved and fought many things.' 'Our generation's battle is this, and we have to protect ourselves and our families by not letting the virus get to us.'

Dewey Library - RB127.T383 2018

Online Resource

Online Resource

Hayden Library - RC440.82.W68 2018

Barker Library - RB111.K895 2018

Online Resource

Online Resource

Online Resource

Online Resource

Hayden Library - RA1231.L4 R39 2018

Online Resource

Online Resource

Online Resource

Online Resource

Inexpensive inkjet printers and scanners enable big advances in the small world of UTLC.

I’ve been working on this site, Fifty, to track a list of restaurants that I’ve been to. Each new restaurant was a list item. The list will eventually reach 50 items and a long list is long and visually uninteresting.

The first attempt was to use CSS columns. I threw on a column-width and bam. Slightly more visually interesting—at least, on larger screens. It’s still just an ordered list on smaller screens.

Lately, I’ve been wanting to play with layout that had more of a magazine feel. (I’ve also been wanting to do an actual magazine but that’s a story for another day.) I even picked up a stack of magazines from the local bookstore to get some inspiration and ideas.

One thing that I noticed is that they’ll play with grids to create visual interest or to move your eye through a more dense page.

Magazines have the advantage of a fixed size. For the web, we need to consider everything from watches to wide screens. CSS Grid seemed like a great way to play around with different options.

Repeat

Grid’s repeat function is one of my favourite tools. It’s like a built-in responsive design tool that instantly creates a flexible design. I tell it the minimum column size and then it will create the number of columns that’ll fit into the space allotted.

grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fill, minmax(250px, 1fr))

This, in and of itself, isn’t much over what I had before. I beefed up the style with some numbers in boxes.

Spanning Columns and Rows

To make things more interesting, I wanted to have items pop out, both in size and colour. If everything popped out, it would be overwhelming and I didn’t think it’d make the list any easier to parse.

I decided to create a pattern that would work when I had a few items and would continue to work as I completed restaurants on the adventure.

The first idea I had to make certain items stand out was to have some restaurants take up two columns and two rows and include a photo.

I specified the row and column span:

grid-row: span 2;
grid-column: span 2;

A problem reared its ugly head when the page scaled down to a single column. Why is this a problem? By spanning an item over 2 columns, there will always be 2 columns, even if I only want 1.

I’d love a way to say: grid-column: span minmax(1,2). It’d take two columns if there’s two columns; otherwise, it only takes one column.

Instead, I had to define a media query for when there was a single column and adjust the spans for that.

@media (max-width: 674px) {
    .restaurants li {
      grid-column: span 1 !important;
    }  
}

(I probably should’ve done this mobile first and defined the default as span 1 and then did a min-width for anything that wasn’t mobile. But it’s a personal site and whatevs.)

I played around with what would create the best look at all viewports and with various items. I wish I could say I had a magical formula but it was really just trial and error. I’d put something together and then resize to see how it’d look. Then play around with the numbers until I had something I liked.

The next problem was to make it looks semi-random. Or provided some alternation with where the spanned items would be placed. If I just use :nth-child then weird patterns can emerge at different viewport widths.

To solve this problem, I’d use multiple :nth-child declarations with alternating offsets. This provided the best results over all viewports.

Random colours

I was okay with that but I wanted more. I decided to use the alternate colours, green and brown, on random boxes. CSS doesn’t have a random function, which would’ve been really handy here. Instead, I tried to figure out what offset would create a pleasing pattern. Again, this was a lot of trial and error figuring out offsets that worked well.

.restaurants-devoured li:nth-child(17n-16):before { … }
.restaurants-devoured li:nth-child(11n+12):before { … }

And again, I used a similar solution to how I placed the large boxes. Offsetting numbers with multiple patterns helps create the illusion of randomness.

The Result

I’m really happy with the way the grid turned out. Probably the biggest problem is that people look for meaning in patterns. “Why are these restaurants a different size or colour? Are these the ones you like best or stood out to you for some reason?” The answer is no, there’s no significance. I thought it would look nice. Unsure how I’d tweak the design to make the insignificance more obvious.

I look forward to going to more restaurants and seeing the grid continue to fill in.

More RSS Feed: newsroom.cisco.com/rss-feeds ...

Chez Reavie, Keith Mitchell, Viktor Hovland, Danielle Kang, Nelly Korda and Jessica Korda Partner with Worldwide Technology Leader
More RSS Feed: newsroom.cisco.com/rss-feeds ...

Roos, Gregory, author

Chief minister Uddhav Thackeray on Friday refuted rumours that the army would be called out in Mumbai as Covid-19 cases showed no signs of abating, and said if required, the state may seek additional forces from the Centre to afford rest to the stretched state police force in a phased manner. “If you violate the lockdown, you are extending the crisis,” he said.