Blogging and all that Malarkey

For 35 weeks every year—three weeks per month—I work with Nozomi Networks guiding the creative direction and experience design of their cyber security products. The team is growing, so we’re looking for a product designer to join us.

As I’ve said plenty of times before, a well-chosen grid can do much, much more than align content. Our choice of grid can influence how we approach a design and it can change how we think about layout. That’s especially true of modular grids.

Sam Sycamore tweeted a utility class for breaking an element out of its container to fill the full width of a page. It prompted me to think about how and when to use utility classes.

Compound grids offer exciting and often unconventional layout possibilities. Most importantly, they also encourage us to think differently about the choices we make when we’re designing layouts. If you’re familiar with the grid made ubiquitous by Bootstrap, a 3+4 compound grid is a great place to start learning about compound grids.

I’ve said over and over again that a well-chosen grid can do much, much more than align content. The choice of grid can influence how we approach a design, it can change how we think.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been specifying different colours for hyperlinks and their:hover pseudo-classes. Recently, I’ve been experimenting with CSS filters and found they make development much easier.

Although I don’t get to do it as often as I’d like, I enjoy working with startups. So, I was thrilled to be asked to work on a website design for Worrysome, a new business which aims to take the worry out of worrying.

Rooting around in boxes in our storage unit, I came across the Nintendo Game Boy I bought new in 1990. The plastic covering the green LCD was missing, but it was otherwise intact. The box even contained a few game cartridges. I popped it in my pocket and took it home.

Ekster sent me their iPhone 12 MagSafe wallet for review. The short version? I like it. But, I probably wouldn’t buy it.

When I was developing the SVG panel for principles on the Stuff & Nonsense about page, I ran into a problem which could only be fixed using.