I’m a Product Designer and I live in Los Angeles.
That means that, yes, I sometimes wear t-shirts I got for free from some start-up you’ll never hear of, and yes, I sometimes order coffee drinks with more syllables than ingredients.
This blog is similarly predictable. It’s about designing products for the internet and probably has all of the earmarks and trappings of other blogs on similar topics. hasLayout is where I come to talk about the web-related trends, events, and hullabaloos that interest me most. I might write about a cool new CSS technique for creating tabs or rounded corners, or I might write about a start-up taking an interesting approach to a solving a business problem. I might also rant off-topic, which is really bad practice, but we’re all friends here.
Jason Carlin is shorter than he looks
Really, that’s just wishful thinking that I look taller than I am.
I’m currently employed as Director of Product Development at GOGII, maker of the awesome textPlus app for the iPhone and iPod touch.. Not too long ago I held the same title at an entertainment marketing firm called DigiSynd, which was the spiritual successor to Revver.com where I had been Senior Architect of User Experience. Also: yada yada ifilm.com, Mesaure Map yada, yada The Designory, yada yada McElroy Advertising. Before I got involved in all that startup mumbo-jumbo, I was an agency guy, but I always found the projects too fleeting. I like to obsess over getting to know an audience and designing and tweaking a product to suit them. I’m also fascinated by the way users embrace convention and while being enthralled by innovation. It’s kinda like a less creepy version of Stockholm Syndrome.
Also, I’m about 5′8″ soaking wet.
Ok, what about the weird blog name?
As I explained in my first post, the blog’s name is a bit of an inside joke for us CSS nuts. I’ll repeat myself here:
The term “hasLayout” first made the scene in an article entitled On Having Layout. In it, the author describes a property called “layout” that IE assigns (or does not assign) certain qualifying HTML elements, thus granting them physical dimensions. As it turns out, a huge number of IE CSS bugs are caused by IE not knowing when to grant an element “layout”. The author defines “layout” as follows:
“‘Layout’ is an IE/Win proprietary concept that determines how elements draw and bound their content, interact with and relate to other elements, and react on and transmit application/user events.
This quality can be irreversibly triggered by some CSS properties. Some HTML elements have ‘layout’ by default.
Microsoft developers decided that elements should be able to acquire a ‘property’ (in an object-oriented programming sense) they referred to as hasLayout, which is set to true when this rendering concept takes effect.”
For a more in-depth explanation of hasLayout, read the original article (trust me, it’s worth your time).