We’re not just making pretty interfaces, we’re actually in the process of building an environment where we’ll spend most of our time for the rest of our lives. We’re the designers. We’re the builders. Spine tingling stuff from Wilson Miner’s Build 2011 talk.

When I was eleven, I was part of a group of friends who used to meet at the school library at lunch time to make comics. My job was to do the lettering for the speech bubbles and make the cover. I did this by tracing the letters out of my growing collection of lettering books. Continue reading »

We’re all familiar with Google’s ‘did you mean…’ feature when you accidentally misspell a search term; could the same approach work for some gentle validation on data inputs? Continue reading »

Born 29th October 2011. Continue reading »

Go without a coat when it’s cold; find out what cold is. Go hungry; keep your existence lean. Wear away the fat, get down to the lean tissue and see what it’s all about. The only time you define your character is when you go without… Continue reading »

As creatives it can sometimes feel like our output depends entirely on our mood. We dread going through spells where work can feel like an uphill battle. The truth is these dry spells are inevitable and it’s important that we have the skills and perseverance to get through them. Continue reading »

This quote from this article by Guy Kawasaki has stuck with me all weekend.
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I just woke up to the sad news that Steve Jobs has passed away. Rest in Peace 

Local comedy podcast duo Tim and Simon announced a pretty cool project today; on the 27th of September they will be recording and releasing 24 podcasts in 24 hours all in the name of charity. Continue reading »

Chris Coyier and Paravel have joined forces and written jQuery plugin called FitVids to solve the biggest challenge with responsive design: embedded videos. Continue reading »

Rogie King just posted this fantastic code snippet to help target CSS at specific browsers, even specific versions of browsers. Certainly a new tool for the kit of any web designer. Check it out. Continue reading »

I love this video, I first saw it a few months back but I find myself watching it all the time. Plus the music is by The Decemberists so double awesome. Continue reading »

Steve Balmer once said “developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers…” well, you get the idea. It seems Local Government took this tirade to heart and started hiring developers, developers developers… Continue reading »

This is a proof of concept made by Jordi Parra for his degree project and it really is something special. For me Spotify playlists are the closest you can get to modern-day mix tapes but Jordi takes it to whole new level and makes me really miss the permanence and sincerity of a c-90 Continue reading »

A fantastic collection of tips and insider advice about what it’s really like to be a designer, this article kept me up far too late. Continue reading »

After what has been a pretty terrible week, today Paul Annett posted the following on his Twitter Continue reading »

Surely there is a better way to judge customer satisfaction than an intrusive, distracting pop-up window that demands my attention? If you do get me to fill out your satisfaction survey I will be biased because you have asked for it so arrogantly. You can’t rely on the results you get if you’ve annoyed your customer by asking.

Via http://allthatinspires.me/the-rebels-manifesto

Writing down what I like about other people’s sites in the hope it will give me a wishlist for my own.

This is something I do in almost every WordPress theme I create, yet whenever I come to do it I can never remember how. I’m hoping that writing it down will help me remember.
To get all posts, except those with certain tags, you have to use the function ‘tag__not_in()’. Continue reading »

Last week I attended New Adventures in Web Design 2011, and I wanted to write a few thoughts about the day. Instead of a blow-by-blow account I’m going to share what I thought made this conference so special, and why I will be attending again. Continue reading »

If like me you spend a large chunk of your day reading to keep up with the web industry you probably find there aren’t enough hours in the day to get through everything you want to. Over the last few years I have started using podcasts as a way to keep up to speed with our industry and to entertain myself during downtime. Podcasts have become a staple of my weekly routine, I find they are the best way to use those hours of the day I spend travelling to work, driving or doing household chores to do something positive. I listen to a wide range of podcasts and below is a small list of some of my favourites: Web … Continue reading »

The Mac App Store launched today to much fanfare, bringing with it the first apps available for purchase and download. There is fair amount of launch day content (although Espresso is currently absent, which will be my first purchase) including Twitter for Mac. It’s not all great though, as it turns out there is no way to transfer an app purchase to the new app store, meaning you miss out on auto updates and other benefits unless you repurchase the license. So the iLife 11 upgrade I bought in October will have to stay in application limbo until the next paid-for upgrade. As has become the usual from Apple, bittersweet.

Holy crap where has the time gone? I got married, moved house and we are about to go to Australia for three weeks. I haven’t done anything since relaunching my site and probably won’t until the new year – but fear not. In 2011 I will return and I will be taking on some more freelance jobs, I’m pumped about web design at the moment having just read through Andy Clarke‘s book, Hardboiled web design and am getting excited already. Here’s to next year!

Google have started rolling out Google Instant, a new feature of their search engine today. Once enabled Google Instant performs your search and begins fetching results as you type, something that has to be experienced. I like it, but it will take some getting used to.

There are some amazing replacement iTunes 10 icons on Dribbble following the backlash against the new icon unveiling.

I’ve just gone live with my new design. It has been a week of hard work and late nights but it’s finally coming together and I just couldn’t wait any longer to launch it. Continue reading »

While doing my best to avoid redesigning this site (it’s harder than I thought) I have been working with Dan on a minisite for my Anchorman themed stag night here. Take a look and tell me what you think. Don’t forget to have a click around as there are a couple of easter eggs.

This site has been up for just under a year, and I’ve learnt a lot  so I’ve decided to take a break from freelance work to rethink and redesign. What does this mean? The general look and feel has come to feel quite clunky and over simple, I’d like to make it a bit more delicate and thought out, but still retain the same general feel I’m not counting on using my site to find freelance work via cold enquiries, so less of a ‘salesy’ tone to the copy I’m not posting to my blog as often as I could be, due to some decisions made in the last design. I’d like to go much more down the Tumblr route … Continue reading »

I’m selling my much loved Canon DSLR, I’ve not been getting the use out of it I had hoped so I am selling it on to free up some cash. I’m also selling a 50mm 1.8 lens, a battery grip and a Canon speedlite 430EX. Continue reading »

This microcopy in Google Chrome made me laugh out loud. Continue reading »

This is a collection of rules, best practices and other tidbits I have been collecting over the last 3 years, I thought that as I find them so useful I would share them with the world. The first part focuses on my favourite part of web design: typography. Continue reading »

Dear HSBC,

Saving for a wedding means I’ve been checking my various internet banking accounts quite often, and although yours is one of the better ones, there’s something that’s been bothering me. You see, when I get to your homepage, I have to click through to log-in on a separate page. How about shortening my journey slightly?

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I got tired of recreating the same guides and shapes every time I start a new mockup so this evening I put together a new photoshop template and I thought other people may find it helpful. Continue reading »

Much to Donna’s surprise, I’ve finished and launched our wedding website. Recently I’ve been collecting things I really want to try out but I’ve been waiting for the right project to come along. Seeing as a website for our wedding is about as personal as projects get, now is the time to buckle down and have some fun. Continue reading »

I will be writing a more detailed blog post about it, once I’ve ironed out some of the details. But here it is, the site for our wedding. Continue reading »

Joe List takes mustaches and devil horns to a whole new level to create his weekly blog The Annotated Weekender. It will only be a matter of time until he’s hired by The Guardian themselves. Go take a look. Continue reading »

Dear website owners, if you don’t put all of your content in your RSS feeds, I’m not seeing it. Since I found the RSS reader for me, my use of RSS has ballooned, and I rarely visit your website any more. Continue reading »

Birmingham City Council recently launched their redesigned and redeveloped website. Costing £2.8 million and taking over five years, to say it is controversial is an understatement, especially when it became very clear that the price and timescale is not reflected in the quality. Continue reading »

I don’t want to be too mean to Amazon. I accept they run a massive website, and I can’t begin to imagine the design challenges they have to overcome. That said… Continue reading »

RSS has always been a technology that never really fit right with me, until recently I was happy using tabbed bookmarks to fire up my 65+ sites of daily reading, letting them load for 5 minutes or so and then clicking through. Continue reading »

After reading Paul Boag‘s article on context (Content is Dead, Long Live Context) I started to consider how much a user’s context should affect the way local authorities deliver certain services. Continue reading »

Occasionally, in my capacity as a web user I spot things so terrible, so badly thought out and so downright arrogant it makes me sad. Below is one such thing… Continue reading »

Research is about determining best practice, finding out if something is possible, or seeing how others have solved the same problems. Research is a process, it takes a lot of time and should be recognised as legitimate phase in a project, just like design, development and testing. Continue reading »

From the initial sketch to the (almost) finished article in a month. You are looking at version 1 of my site. This is the first time I have built a site for myself and it’s the first time I’ve built something this large on Wordpress. Continue reading »

Seriously, I’m still setting things up here, go do something for an hour or two then come back, it’ll be beautiful.