History Commons

Design Credits and Notes

NOTE: Everything on this site is either an original creation or free for use in the public domain.

Layout adapted from an original design by Matthew James Taylor.

Accessible header layout by Paul O'Brien.

Rounded "Krazy Korners" design (blue boxes) by Stu Nicholls.

Rounded corners design (black boxes) by Scott Schiller.

Sitemap adapted from a design by Matt Everson.

Search box adapted from a design by qkin.

JQuery Font Resizer by Drew Douglass (many thanks for Drew's help in revamping his original code to work on this site).

InnerFade jQuery technique adapted from Medienfreunde.

Pullquote JavaScript adapted from a design by Roger Johannson.

Pagination adapted from a design by Antonio Lupetti and Simone Saveri.

Lightbox code adapted from a design by Emanuele Feronato.

Timeline page image display code adapted from W3Schools.

Project page link buttons adapted from a design by Hedger Wang.

Skip navigation originally coded by WebAIM.

Sidebar navigation icons by Oliver Twardowski via Smashing Magazine, and Ben Gillbanks. Social bookmarking icons by Iconspedia. Avatar icons from Forums Extreme.

Transparent PNG Javascript by Drew McLellan.

CSS image resizing code by Sachinkraj.

Color assistance — very helpful for an amateur designer with very limited graphics and color skills — from Adobe's Kuler, December Communications, Dynamic Drive. and Color Schemer. These may be rather blunt instruments for real graphic designers, but they worked for me.

Inspiration and advice from SitePoint, Leon Paternoster, Simon Pascal Klein, and Inspiration Bit. I am greatly in their debt for their ideas, suggestions, and critiques.

The History Commons gratefully acknowledges the work of Sean Mitchell in creating earlier designs. Many of his concepts and ideas have been employed in this design.

Designed and coded by Michael Tuck for the History Commons.

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Image sources (all free for non-profit and individual use): Stock.Xchng, Wikimedia, ThemeHeaders.com, Getty Images/Daylife, National Archives, Seattle Times/Washington Note/public domain, September 11 Digital Archive/National Archives, FreePhoto1.com, US Army, US Air Force Space Command, Wikimedia/Creative Commons, Gerald Ford Presidential Library, and Teacher Tap/public domain.

Design Notes: Thanks to SitePoint's Tommy Olsson, Andrew Kowalik, Dan Schulz, Paul O'Brien, Paul Wilkins, Eric Watson, Centauri, Erik J, Rayzur, and Gary Turner for helping me create a workable design that validates in HTML 4.01 Strict. The CSS does not validate, because of a max-width IE hack. We cordially despise Internet Explorer.... This site is optimized for Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, and any browser compliant with modern Web standards.

Special thanks to one of my students, Unique S. (Out of the mouths of middle school students....) Confidentiality rules preclude my giving her full name, but she is the one who advised me to widen the color scheme farther than the all-blue palette I began with (and now almost completely abandoned). She has a tremendous artistic eye and, needless to say, a good understanding of color.

Typography Notes: I've chosen to use the Vista fonts Segoe UI and Constantia as the primary sans-serif and serif fonts in this site. For these fonts to display properly, you must have ClearType (Windows users) or your system's anti-aliasing enabled. This is a design choice that has its strengths and drawbacks. If you don't have Vista fonts, you're most likely seeing this site in Helvetica/Arial and Georgia, respectively. Linux users, I've employed the appropriate Nimbus and Liberation fonts for your displays.

Accessibility Notes: This site passes the WCAG 1.0 Level A accessibility test as measured by TAW3. It complies with some, but not all, requirements of Levels AA and AAA.