Design
Designing for the iPhone
I've just started designing my first iPhone application and I'm having lots of fun. I've never been a great fan of Apple and will continue to obstinately refuse to use anything other than a PC but after 15 years in web design it's refreshing to try my hand at something new. Who knows, this could become a whole new career! 21 April 2010Presentation for IT Skills 4 Rural Kenya
I recently gave a seminar on how to build a good website to a group of volunteers for IT Skills 4 Rural Kenya. This was in association with the 'Brighton Youths Volunteer' project, a 3-6 month P/T volunteer opportunity for 16-25 year olds from Brighton and Hove that is funded by Southern FM and Global Charities' v Project partnership.
More » 19 June 2009 | No comments yetHow to spot quality within web design
While perusing my popurls page today I stumbled upon this little gem of an article. As I'm about to embark on the redesign of the OfficeTime website I've been searching for inspiration as well as researching the latest design patterns and conventions. Touching on everything from 1px highlights and drop shadows to current trends in typography and spacing this article has given me plenty to think about. 13 April 2009Graded Browser Support
The day has come for our company to start offering graded browser support a la Yahoo's A-Grade Browser Support Chart. I think it's a much smarter approach than spending hours trying to get all browsers to render the website exactly the same. This way there's a little common sense flexibility. Better for the client, better for us. 21 February 2007Typography
I recently visited Dictionary.Com and discovered a redesign using some quite attractive typography. I find that after working for such a long time in web design restricted to Arial, Verdana and Times New Roman I find it hard to break out of that habit. A site I really admire for its typography is A List Apart. It's very creative and makes the site a pleasure to read. When Vista is released a whole new bunch of fonts will be available for web use which is quite exciting! 03 November 2006Newsletter designs
I've recently been sent this very handy collection of good HTML newsletter designs. It's really helpful to see how other people are approaching this tricky subject and quite inspiring too! 03 October 2006Character sets
So this is an obscure one, but in case it helps someone else....I was recently attempting to embed French special characters in a flash movie for use with sIFR but the dialog box only lets you choose various character sets. I have no idea what is actually IN each set so it was very confusing. Luckily I finally found the Unicode site where it is all explained. 21 September 2006Web 2.0 Design
Ok, it has finally driven me to write this rant. The whole "Web 2.0" design style. It's like every designer in the web community has suddenly lost all independent creative thought and started cloning the site next to him/her. It's driving me nuts! First off, the colour palette. Apparently it must all be lime green, orange and teal blue - preferably all together. Second you must have gradients especially on dark grey backgrounds. Third you must use HUGE fonts, all the same font faces, oh and italics. Other rules to follow are using rounded corners, making your site stretchy and making use of a reflective drop shadow somewhere. God help us all, even Slashdot has fallen victim with its redesign:Mint - lime green, dark grey gradients = 2 Web 2.0 points
Slashdot - dark grey gradients, stretchy, rounded corners, italics = 4 Web 2.0 points
Ning - lime green, teal blue, huge fonts, rounded corners = 4 Web 2.0 points
Clear Left - lime green, stretchy, huge fonts, italics, reflective drop shadow = 5 Web 2.0 points
@Media - lime green, orange, teal blue, stretchy, huge fonts, italics, reflective drop shadow = 7 Web 2.0 points THE WINNER!! 31 May 2006 | 2 comments