While I'm not one to be found nose-deep in a broadsheet, let alone The Telegraph, I have to admire the simplicity of their site design, especially when learning to recreate existing CSS content. At least that what I expected this project to be like, but when I finally got pen to paper, I realised just how wrong I was.
A job like this takes a lot of planning, and the nuances within the design have proven to be unexpectedly complex. I've struggled with defining the number of <div> elements I require, scared to add more as the list of classes and tags extends longer and longer. Editing headings and other elements that also double up with the <a> tag has also been difficult - having to style a:link, a:visted, a:hover sometimes individually and sometimes not picking up changes at all. Furthermore, trying to style the numbers in a list seemed near impossible until I found this nifty tutorial which instead utilised the <span> tag (Design Shack - 5 Simple and Practical CSS List Styles You Can Copy and Paste).
While I haven't looked around yet, it would also be nice to have a colour-picker desktop app - no more copying images into Photoshop, thank you very much. I suspect there might be a tool out there for this, if not, hold that thought!
The article in particular that I'm trying to mimic is the 15 maps that will change the way you see the world travel piece. It contains a lot of images, lists, links and interesting formatting qualities. I thought it would prove an interesting challenge while not been beyond my range.
At first glance, I'm not sure if my current attempt would fool anyone, but the building blocks are definitely in place. As you can clearly see, I'm struggling with the positioning, trying to wrap my head around absolute and relative, margin and padding in particular.
There are also the colouring issues I mentioned when dealing with an element that is both a heading/p element and a <a> tag. For reasons I don't yet understand, their style only applies correctly on hover.
As a first pass, I'm happy to keep banging my head against the wall until I get to the bottom of this. I hope, by the next major update, to have fixed the positioning and link colouring issues.
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