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It’s been one helluva busy, tiring but inspiring week, traveling first to speak at An Event Apart Boston, then, with Jeremy Keith and Jason Santa Maria onto London for @media2009. At both events, I presented Walls Come Tumbling Down. Here are the presentation slides and transcript
It’s been ten days since I uploaded the last batch of New Internationalist design files. Since then the team at New Internationalist have had time to live with the templates and make a small number of suggestions and requests that I have implemented over the last couple of days.
Smashing Magazine published an excellent primer for CSS3 properties by Inayaili de Leon today which referenced a little of my work. I was pleased, but as today as gone on and I’ve watched the comments roll, my heart started to sink.
As true now as it was in 1986.
While the folks at New Riders work hard on editing the three DVDs that I recorded in February, and I make trouble by asking for tiny changes, I turned my attention to designing the cover artwork.
Could this be the day that I eat my words about CSS frameworks? I’ve been mean to them in the past, written harsh things. I once likened them to instant cake mixes in response to Jeff Croft’s What’s not to love about CSS frameworks?.
Last Monday, I met up with the New Internationalist team to talk about what we had accomplished so far in the redesign and the remaining issues. As he was in the area, we were also joined by my friend and design meeting interloper Dan Rubin.
I wanted to learn more about CSS attribute selectors.
— This article was originally published on And All That Malarkey on February 20th, 2005.
Now is the time, particularly during this open design process, where I get nervous about presenting the design I hope to launch. While I know that there are still aspects left to resolve, I wanted to share my process and thinking behind what I’m showing today.
For the last few days I’ve been working on the branding aspects of my New Internationalist redesign and I have to admit that I’m struggling. There is a raging argument going on in my head. Please help me make it stop.
As I’m putting together Walls Come Tumbling Down, the talk that I am giving this year at @media 2009 London and An Event Apart, I wanted to share some of my notes on how the current recession will affect the way that web designers and developers work.
Well, perhaps not quite everything. Today Jeffrey Veen let the cat out of the proverbial. He announced Typekit.
It’s possible that this should be an elsewhere entry, but as so many people have emailed, tweeted and otherwise asked about the placeholder images that I’m using in my New Internationalist redesign process, I thought I’d share the source.
Thanks to all of the excellent and constructive feedback so far, I am today working towards the New Internationalist pages that I am designing being feature complete and ready for sign-off next week. With that in mind, I wanted to share with you a top-down view of all of the pages that I have been working on.
Today I want to share and invite your feedback on my work on the New Internationalist blog pages.
I hope that New Internationalist readers will never see 404 Page Not Found.
Today I want to share and invite your feedback on my work on the New Internationalist magazine pages.
Most often when I’m designing a new site, I focus first on its content pages. Then, working from the inside-out, I finally arrive at the home page. This is the approach that I’ve taken in my work for New Internationalist. That said, a site’s home page is often what people want to see first, so who am I to disagree? Today I want to share and invite your feedback on my work on the New Internationalist home page.
A very telling video about what the average person is thinking when they use the Web.
Have you ever wanted to do if-statements in your CSS for the availability of cool features like border-radius? Well, with Modernizr you can accomplish just that!
— Now this is promising. I will be testing and writing about Modernizr later this week. Also, read Proudly Announcing: Modernizr by Faruk Ateş.
Firefox 3.5 was released earlier today, and joins Safari in supporting the @font-face rule with OpenType and TrueType font families, allowing you to use a wider range of fonts in your designs (as long as they are correctly licensed, of course).
— local(), now that’s interesting.
Jon Hicks’ presentation slides from @media2009.
Kenny Meyers on tweets as comments in ExpressionEngine.
Shows how the U.S. government controlled and conserved vehicles, typewriters, sugar, shoes, fuel, and food. (via @brunsvold)
html5doctor is a collaboration between, Rich Clark, Bruce Lawson, Jack Osborne, Mike Robinson, Remy Sharp and Tom Leadbetter.
— I learned something in the first five minutes, good stuff.
Dan Rubin‘s Designing Virtual Realism presentation from @media2009 and An Event Apart Seattle.
Simon Collison gave the talk of the show at @media2009 and Greg Wood‘s slides were the best I’ve ever seen at any conference.
Mandy Brown is a Creative Director at W. W. Norton & Company, where her work involves everything from book design to web design to writing about design.— How do I love the design of this site? Let me count the ways.
Firebug is a revolutionary Firefox extension that helps web developers and designers test and inspect front-end code.
— Perfect for when you’re designing in browser.
I would venture to guess that z-index is probably the CSS property that is more speedily abandoned than any other.
— Nice overview. You might also want to read my Z’s not dead baby, Z’s not dead for 24ways from 2005.
Custom Letters is an evolving category that includes calligraphy, sign painting, graffiti, stone carving, digital lettering, hand lettering, paper sculpture, and type design.
Now that all the major browsers include the ability to zoom the entire page layout, rather than just increase text size, are liquid and elastic layouts obsolete? Can’t we just use fixed-width layouts and let the user zoom them if needed? The answer to that question depends on whether browser zoom solves all of the same problems than liquid and elastic layouts solve, and I don’t think it does.
— Excellent article from Zoe Mickley Gillenwater.
How did I not hear about this before?
Fluid web designs have many benefits, but only if implemented correctly. With proper technique, a design can be seen correctly on large screens, small screens and even tiny PDA screens.
— The next version of Stuff and Nonsense will be fully fluid, so this might be perfect timing.
For optimum efficiency, designers should not only be concerned with painting the bigger picture but also building it! In this article, I’d like to share with you some reasons why designers should learn how to code.
Using ExpressionEngine’s versatile templating system for features such as skinning, forums and user reviews, and leaving Magento handle the things that it does best - stock control and finances.
— As an ExpressionEngine devotee, this could be very useful. Watch this space.
Most sites would benefit from a typography makeover — a nip and tuck, a glyph graft or a pair of silicon smart quotes. In this non-invasive session, self-confessed typography perfectionist Andy Clarke will take his scalpel to a site of your choice to demonstrate the fundamentals of type and practical ways that you can improve the look and readability of your content with better typography. Andy won’t know which site we choose until surgery opens.
— September 2nd 2009, Belfast.