Blogging and all that Malarkey

I’ve just finished my third (in my series of 12) Inspired Design Decisions webinars for Smashing Magazine. This month, I spoke about how to combine consistency with variety to create a consistent experience of a design across an entire product, publication, or website.

While developing prototype designs for a French football magazine, I came across a strange bug when Chrome’s translate feature comes into contact with CSS generated content.

These days, most of my travel is to my biggest clients in France and Switzerland, but there’s also travel to speak at the occasional conference, and the odd business trip. Every time I travel, I take with me the same set of cables and chargers.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow afternoon (May 21st,) and sitting down with Smashing Magazine’s Vitaly Friedman for the second of my Inspired Design Decisions webinars, exclusive for Smashing members. This webinar is my deepest dive so far into the concept of compound grids and how to use them.

With modern CSS properties including Grid, Flexbox, Multi-column, and Shapes, designers have countless opportunities to make diverse, and engaging designs. Sadly, many of us haven’t had the memo which gives us permission to make more interesting work, so I decided to write that memo. Feel free to modify the message for your company or organisation and of course, circulate it to the designers on your team.

One message I wanted to put across when writing my new book was that there are already examples of art direction on the web, in products and on websites. I wanted to showcase some examples in a series of case studies.

While I was researching typefaces for a new project, I came across Dalton Maag’s case study for Universal TV. The type is beautiful, of course, but it was their graphics which got my attention.

Last year, Rachel Andrew wrote an article that took a new look at CSS Shapes in which she reintroduced readers to the basics of using CSS Shapes. In a new tutorial for Smashing Magazine, I expand on the topic of Art Direction for the Web with CSS Shapes to create exciting and inspired new design ideas.

I’ve written plenty of times before about how important it can be to look offline for inspiration to improve the things we make online. Last year, a few friends and I met in London for an inspiring visit to the Photographers Gallery.

To help celebrate the launch of Art Direction For The Web, Smashing TV’s Bruce, Scott and I spent an hour talking about my new book. The video from that conversation is now on the YouTube.