By Lee Sykes
January & February 2006
This is a 24 minute interview with Tyler Fawcett discussing Skinning
Tyler Fawcett won the Best Overall and Most Original skin for his Tranquillity Skin in the DotNetNuke skinning competition, you can view a selection of his skins at his website
http://www.tfdnn.com
In this skinning interview we discuss planning, colour selection, best working practices along with various other tips and tricks.
Questions
Here is an extract of the questions from the interview:
Overview
In your opinion Tyler, what do you think makes a good skin?
And following that what would you regard as bad skin design and what should we try to avoid?
Planning
Regarding the initial planning of a skin, what are your main design considerations?
Working with colours
How do you choose the colour scheme for a skin?
What are the main considerations when choosing a colour scheme?
Do you have any resources you can pass onto the listeners for selecting a colour scheme?
(Links mentioned:
http://www.colorblender.com and
http://www.colormatch.dk)
Best working practices
Could you outline the process you go through when creating a skin?
Working with panes & layout
How do you decide on the layout of the skin and how do you decide where to place the content panes?
On average where do you place content panes?
Do you create several skin variations of the same design which consists of several content pane layouts? and What skin variations do you usually create?
Testing
What methods do you use for testing your skin?
Which browsers do you test the skin against?
In which browsers do you think it is essential that your skin works correctly, and which browsers do you think are non-essential?
Setup & Tips
Could you explain to the listeners what your setup is for creating skins, for example, the software you use & how you quickly view the changes while editing a skin.
For the beginners to skinning, could you explain the differences between using a .htm and .ascx file.
CSS
Working with CSS and DotNetNuke
Top Tips:
Final tips for the listeners regarding skinning