And All That Malarkey archives

I would like to share some very exciting news about Hardboiled Web Design.

Today, RIM unveiled its latest mobile browser. It runs WebKit making every mobile platform except one run that rendering engine. With that in mind, I’d like you to try this experiment.

In other conference news, this time of the online kind, I will be broadcasting from my orbiting space-station for The CSS3 Online Conference,  organised by Carsonified on March 22nd.

The conference that got it all started for me as a speaker comes back to London on June 10th and 11th for a sixth year, this time with a new face — Web Directions @media.

A month ago I tweeted about my own frustrations with learning jQuery. If you’re a designer or developer and you feel the same way, I’m over the moon to announce a new For A Beautiful Web workshop: jQuery for Designers with Remy Sharp.

After traveling from the USA for An Event Apart to Australia and Japan for Web Directions in 2009, I had expected 2010 to be quieter. I was wrong. 2010 is going to be busier and more hardboiled than ever.

A week ago I was grumbling (again) on Twitter about JavaScript selector engines and enablers for Internet Explorer.

Just out, issue 132 of Computer Arts Projects, including a section on a Decade Of Web Design featuring interviews with Brendan Dawes, Elliot Jay Stocks and me. If you can’t get out today to pick up a copy, here is my interview.

I asked: Web designers are cool, but private detectives are cooler. No argument, but why can’t you be both? The answer? You can.

When the W3C announced that it was retreating from XHTML2 after years in the trenches, propagandists trumpeted that advocacy of XHTML had been foolish. With HTML5 again mired in corporate politics, egotism, squabbles and petty disagreements, it is easy to see why people are questioning if using or advocating HTML5 now is foolish too? At least until all parties reach some kind of armistice.

For A Beautiful Web is starting 2010 with a bang, by bringing Dan Rubin, one of world’s best designers and mobile specialists, to the UK for a full day workshop teaching the key steps to help you transform your site for mobile users.

I’m in the middle of preparing materials for a new book, “Hardboiled Web Design”. To demonstrate CSS3 selectors, transforms and transitions I’m putting together a page in the demonstration site, “It’s Hardboiled”. That’s where you come in.

Always an example of the best the web design industry has to offer, this year 24 ways, the advent calendar for web geeks, has its focus firmly set on moving your web design forward.

(On 24th December 2009, the site that this letter refers to was replaced.)

Writing this week about eating accessibility humble pie and using CSS attribute substring selectors, a comment by clever Craig Cook sent my imagination reeling.

We all make mistakes. Right? Particularly when it comes to accessibility. Often in the rush to ready a site for launch, we forget to check the details that can make a world of difference. That’s what I did when I launched the latest For A Beautiful Web.

Changingman, a liquid three column CSS layout with a fixed positioned and width centre column, released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license. (This entry was originally posted on 23rd November 2005 and has been updated in 2009.)

Tomorrow I leave for Japan, taking For A Beautiful Web‘s Advanced CSS Styling workshop to Tokyo and then presenting an edited version of Walls Come Tumbling Down at Web Directions East 2009.

Relly Annett-Baker on first draft copy for CannyBill.

Now that our For A Beautiful Web workshops calendar is closed for the year, it was time to push live a redesign of that site with a focus on my new DVDs. This was a chance for me to play, both with HTML5 and CSS transforms and transitions to spice up the interface.

Web forms often ask visitors for non-essential information, but long and complicated forms can hinder a sales or sign-up process. Wouldn’t it be cool to give users the option to hide these optional fields at their own discretion. (This entry was originally posted in 2004 and has been updated in 2009.)

If you’ve been looking to buy any (or all) of my three new For A Beautiful Web DVDs (Designing With CSS, Designing Web Accessibility and Designing With Microformats) from Amazon.co.uk, you’ll have noticed that they are not listed. Here’s why.

Before we send over our design files to the chaps at CannyBill, first a run through of the browsers that we have tested in the new design and some musings about what browser testing actually means today, in the face of an ever more diversified browser and device landscape.

With the first phase of the CannyBill redesign process drawing to a close, I would like to say a huge thank-you to the CannyBill team for encouraging a public, open design process and to everyone who has commented and tweeted their helpful suggestions.

When is it the right thing to do not to attempt to reinvent a well established, tried and tested design pattern or convention. This question has come up while I have been designing the CannyBill prices and plans page.

A fascinating look at Relly Annett-Baker‘s process of writing copy for CannyBill and finding its voice.

It’s not everyday that I get to work with a client that completely gets why it’s important to push the progressive enrichment boundaries by using HTML5 and the kind of advanced CSS styling that I teach at my workshops. Luckily, the CannyBill team do more than get it. I’d like to share a little of the HTML5 and CSS that I’m using for this project.

Relly Annett-Baker guests on And All That Malarkey.

After two weeks on the CannyBill redesign project (one of which I spent traveling to Chicago for An Event Apart), it time for deep breaths as I talk about my design of the home page for the new CannyBill front of house site and ask for your thoughts and suggestions.

Liked most of my projects these days, I’m designing the next iteration of CannyBill‘s front of house site in a browser rather than making static visuals of page layouts. I know I’m in danger of sounding like a broken record, but I genuinely do find the process to be faster and better at scoping ideas and demonstrating them to clients. So I thought I’d share the start of this process and the files that I use.

I have to confess that when I’m designing, I often don’t take too much notice of a company’s peers or competitors.

While open to the public redesign projects have lately been popularised by Mark Boulton Design‘s work for Drupal and by Happy Cog‘s work for Mozilla, it’s rare to find a commercial company involved in an open project.

Last Friday I recorded a video interview with Ryan Taylor. In it I talk about my first job (making My Little Ponies), web design and conference speaking.

I’m busy working on the slide deck and example site files for our Advanced CSS Styling workshops in Birmingham, Newcastle (and Tokyo). I’m really excited about this new workshop format and wanted to share one of the example site pages.

Today I’m reviewing the final edit of my Designing With CSS DVD. I couldn’t resist sharing the end credits and gag reel.

The Carsonified roadies have loaded their white Transit and braved the ferry across the sea to Northern Ireland. This week I’m joining the Future Of Web Design Tour in Belfast, presenting “How to Design in the Browser”. More on that later. But first, a one-hour workshop, “Extreme Makeover, Typography Edition”

It’s here — months in the planning and weeks in the making — the new Stuff and Nonsense. The new design is a continuation of my efforts to blend professional and personal styles into a brand that is as much about my personality and interests as it is about our work.

What can I say? How chuffed am I? Chuffed to little mint balls, that’s how much. Why? Because I am excited to announce that everyone who registers for a For A Beautiful Web master-class will receive a one-year Typekit Portfolio subscription, courtesy of our friends at Small Batch.

It’s a secret I need keep no longer — we’re taking For A Beautiful Web to Japan in partnership with our friends at Web Directions.

I’m back from two-weeks hard-earned holiday in the south of France. What have I missed? Over five-hundred unread RSS posts for starters. I’m not usually one for best of entries, but here, in no particular order, are some things that have caught my attention — too many for a deluge of elsewhere entries.

Typotheque is an independent type foundry based in the Netherlands who offer fonts for PC and Macintosh. They have kindly invited me into the beta program of their new @font-face embedding service.

With all the buzz around @font-face delivery services such as Typekit, one question remains to be properly answered. How can web designers show concept work to their clients when the fonts they want to use are hosted (and protected)?

If you’re planning to attend, or thinking about attending, one of our Advanced CSS Styling workshops in either Birmingham on September 25th 2009 or Newcastle Upon Tyne on October 30th 2009, here is the schedule for the event workshop to whet your appetite.

I’ve been slowly evolving the design of For A Beautiful Web over the last few months since I relaunched it in April. Back then I stripped it back from its almost universally unpopular first design, then added hints of a future direction on the home page. Now that design has matured and today I launched its sister site at Transcending CSS.

We had such a great time presenting our master-classes in London last year and in Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney, we decided to host more. ‘Advanced CSS Styling’ will be a one-day workshop in Birmingham on September 25th 2009 and Newcastle Upon Tyne on October 30th 2009. Ten early-bird tickets are available per event at only £275.00+VAT per person, but get in quick, these are sure to be snapped up quickly.

Joe Drew, one of the people on Mozilla’s graphics team has responded to my comment on First Impressions on Typekit; Studying type rendering closely also calls into question the natural differences between the ways that browsers render type as I discussed in Walls Come Tumbling Down. Safari’s text rendering is clearly more refined and superior to Firefox 3.5.

This morning my inbox popped with an invitation to the preview of Typekit, a technology platform that hosts both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM. Back in May I wrote that Typekit will change everything, here are my first impressions of Typekit in action at For A Beautiful Web.

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.