Blogging and all that Malarkey

Keith Devon wants to find out how freelance designers and developers handle contracts. So do I, so go spend a minute filling in his survey. As it stands at the moment, 45% use something like my ‘ Contract Killer ’ (or the contract itself) and another 9% wrote their own based on it. Although responder numbers are small so far, that’s brilliant. I’m prouder of ‘Contract Killer’ than anything else I’ve ever done. Keith Devon’s Freelance contract survey

In this week’s episode, Anna and I discuss Motorhead and motorcycles and how I’m too much of a ‘wendy’ to lift one. Really. We talk about how Stuff and Nonsense’s pattern of weekly working sometimes doesn’t work and how to deal with competing client demands when you have limited time available.

In this week’s episode, lycra wearing, tightrope walker* Anna Debenham and I ask “who would win in a fight? Boba Fett or Batman?” “If the world was ending tomorrow, which endangered species would you eat?” and other important business questions. More importantly we talk about reviews and how they can help improve your business. * We lied about the lycra.

Following up on my M M M Madness post, here are two good links to more on CSS filters: Creating iOS 7 effects with CSS3: translucency and transparency John Allsopp recreates iOS7’s translucency and blur using CSS filters. I suspect we’ll see a lot more of this design aesthetic on the web in the months to come. Create impact with CSS filters video presentation from Alex Danilo Alex Danilo’s presentation on CSS filters from Web Directions Code in Australia is well worth your time too. My prediction? Designers are going to go CSS filter crazy over the next year.

While I was preparing the slides from my full day CSS3 For Responsive Web Design at Smashing Magazine, I got very excited by the new filters in CSS. (313 onwards in my slide deck.) These filters — not to be confused with those legacy, proprietary Microsoft filters — are now well on their way to becoming part of a standard.

In this, the 25th anniversary episode of Unfinished Business, Anna and I talk about working in a supermarket (a while ago, obviously) and how my professional level skiving almost lead me to a career in supermarket management. We talk about selling an experience as well as selling design or code and how creative services are as much about putting on a show as they are about doing work.

I’ve just come back from a trip to beautiful Freiburg in southern Germany where I hosted my new CSS3 For Responsive Web Design workshop at Smashing Magazine. I went to Freiburg last September when Alex and I attended Smashing Conference and we had a brilliant time. The folks at Smashing Magazine were genuinely welcoming and I jumped at the first opportunity to work with them again.

I’ve lived with the new video feature in Instagram for about a week and while I was originally sceptical about whether video and Instagram would be a good match, I thought it best to wait a while before forming an expressing an opinion.

This week, while Anna’s away, I talk to (Alex’s friend) Brad Frost about iOS7, dropping pretzels and chocolate Hobnobs. (Spoiler: Brad had no idea what they are.) In between we talk about speaking and contributing and what you gain by giving away information freely.

In this week’s episode of Unfinished Business, Anna and I talk about me being robbed of my iPhone in Geneva and the implications, both personal and business of what happened. We talk about the importance of ensuring that insurance is up-to-date (spoiler: mine wasn’t) and how to secure your iOS devices and Mac in case of theft.