I’ve always hated publishing. I don’t mean the industry, but the act. Hitting “print,” sending an email, pressing that “Publish” button on the CMS: at some point, you relinquish your ability to smooth down some of the sharper edges, fill in the holes of your argument, and just generally fix whatever’s broken. At some point, you just accept what’s on the page, tousle its hair a bit, and send it off into the world at large to be judged, poked, and prodded. But that doesn’t mean you stop thinking about the article, what you could’ve done differently, and what you wished you’d included.
To wit:
One of the really solid criticisms lobbied against my Fluid Grids article for ALA was that all of my examples were pretty text-heavy. As a result, they all more or less ignored the issue I raised at the end of the essay: that working with non-fixed layouts can be more difficult once you introduce fixed-width elements into them. By default, an image element that’s sized at, say, 500px doesn’t exactly play nicely with an container that can be as large as 800px, but as small as 100px. What’s a designer to do?