In this regular series, I write about what I worked on during the previous week. I’m still in Germany, away from the studio, and I’m missing my space a lot. There’s a big part of me that loves travelling, but an equal part that craves the familiarity of my home workspace.

In this regular series, I write about what I worked on during the previous week. I’ve missed a couple of weeks of reporting because a) I haven’t been in the studio, and b) this site has had major surgery.

In this regular “Last week in the studio” series, I write about what I worked on during the previous week. Last week was one without a solid piece of work to tackle. Instead, I spent it on some updates to a client’s design and on making a little website for myself.

In this regular “Last week in the studio” series, I write about what I worked on during the previous week. Last week was spent on a more business-focused but no less creative project

The view options toolbar at the bottom of my animated banners has irked me for a while. It had grown one button at a time, and the result looked ill-considered rather than designed. With a few minutes to spare at the end of last week, I finally redesigned it.

In this regular “Last week in the studio” series, I write about what I worked on during the previous week. Last week was quiet enough for me to take an afternoon off to enjoy the sunny weather, but I still got plenty done.

Militant was a British socialist newspaper associated with the Militant ‘tendency,’ a left-wing political movement whose members were ultimately expelled from the mainstream Labour Party. I looked back at how the Militant masthead logo evolved between 1964 and 1997.

In this regular “Last week in the studio” series, I write about what I worked on during the previous week. Last week was a good one as I could concentrate on just one thing.

I thought it might be interesting to document what I work on during the week, so I started a regular “Last week in the studio” series. Last week was a bit productive but bitty.

I designed an information-rich website for The Shared Homeland Paradigm, using typography and graphics to clearly and visually explain complex political ideas. Here’s how I approached it.

The Academy of Scoring Arts just launched its new website. It’s a community of arrangers, composers, and musicians that helps industry professionals develop their craft through events and video tutorials.

I designed a website for composer Begoña Pereda using typography and animated SVG graphics to reflect her personality and musical style. Here’s how I approached it.

I’ve been quietly working on a side project called sho!io, and I’m opening it up to a few people. It’s meant to be a quiet place where you can share one thing you’re making each day, without the usual social noise. It’s early and very much still in progress, but I’d really value your honest feedback if you’re up for trying it.

While the smart people finish the Academy of Scoring Arts website’s CMS development, I’ve been rummaging through my design files and rediscovered several concepts that didn’t make it into the final design.

When I’ve had a few spare minutes, I’ve been adding to and optimising my Magnificent 7 character animations to improve rendering speed. Then I had the idea to build a silly fairground-style shooting game, and I set myself the challenge of keeping it as small as possible.

I’d been tinkering with animations last week and wondered what else I could do with my Magnificent 7 characters. I love surprising people with hidden Easter Eggs, so I decided to use them in a little hidden game.

I had some spare time earlier this week to add a little more finesse to my Magnificent 7 animated graphics, so I added a new background to my blog pages’ illustrations, which has some hidden features.

When I started writing for CSS-Tricks, Geoff and I talked about what to put in my bio. He called me a “veteran” web designer. Geez, I felt old enough. So we settled on “pioneer.” That word stuck—and it’s what inspired the new set of animated pioneers now roaming my website.

Yours truly over at the Envato blog: “What if we thought of web design more like a comic book? Comic book nerd and web design pioneer Andy Clarke shows you how the structure of comic book layouts—panels, gutters, and rhythm—can inspire more expressive and narrative-driven web designs.”

This year, I’ve been writing a monthly column on web design inspiration for my friends at Envato. It’s a series about finding inspiration in unusual places and applying what we find to product and website designs. Here’s a recap of the articles so far.

Yours truly over at the Envato blog: “What do giant spiders, invaders from Mars, and a 50-foot woman have in common? Incredible color. B-movie buff and web design pioneer Andy Clarke shows you how the over-the-top palettes of horror and sci-fi posters can inspire memorable color choices for modern websites.”

Late last year, I turned my wee studio into a space for shooting an hour-long web design inspiration tutorial for Envato. Well, the Lessons from Design Greats video is now live on their YouTube channel, and I’m really pleased with how it turned out.

Yours truly over at the Envato blog: “How can a collection of dog-eared posters from the golden age of British wrestling influence the design of today’s websites? Web design pioneer Andy Clarke steps into the ring to give us the lowdown.”

Website design in the ’90s was messy, but it was also magical. It was frequently fraught with accessibility, performance, and usability problems that took us years to solve. But while we addressed them, we discarded much of what was captivating about early websites and replaced them with conservative, commodity designs.

Yours truly over at the Envato blog: “Have you ever considered how ’90s animations might relate to web design today? I show how they inspired a new website design for Emmy-winning composer Mike Worth.”

Yours truly over at the Envato blog: “How can a long-defunct popular music magazine for teens influence the design of today’s websites?”

Yours truly over at the Envato blog: “What do you see when you look at a movie poster? Is it simply advertising to promote a movie or a piece of artwork you’d potentially hang on your wall at home or in an office?”

Yours truly over at the Envato blog: “When I was growing up in the 1980s in a steel-making town that had lost its steelworks, there was a thriving subculture of fanzines and fly posters printed in garages and community centers.”

In my latest Design Chatter video, I talked about how the homelessness charity Crisis aims to be bold and impactful and asked if their website design lives up to those goals? Here’s a written version of that, plus the full versions of my redesigns.

In my latest Design Chatter video, I talked about how the RSPCA rebranded and asked if its website makes the best use of its new look. Here’s a written version of that, plus the full versions of my redesigns.

For most of my career, I’ve encouraged designers and developers to learn from past masters of design and make inspiring web work. Now, I’m launching Stuff & Nonsense Premium Squarespace templates that help them do just that.

The 2024 General Election is just days away, and opinion polls suggest Labour will win with a majority bigger than 1997. Even though I’m not as excited about Labour’s vision as I was then, I still keep my fingers tightly crossed. As I found a few weeks ago, there’s barely anything left of Labour’s labourwin97.org.uk campaign website from its victory in 1997 under Tony Blair. It wasn’t archived by the Wayback Machine, so I imagined what it might’ve looked like.

During the General Election campaign, I’ve been studying political party websites, looking at their user experience and visual designs, and imagining what I’d make if they asked me to work on their designs.

There are less than two weeks before election day, and most of the headlines have come about from things the party leaders have said on the various TV debates. Out of nowhere, Prime Minister Rish! told young people he might take away their driving licences if they refused his national service. Keir Starmer was pushed on his supporting Jeremy Corbyn but not Arsenal, which is an even bigger character flaw. Ed Davey said, well, actually, I can’t remember anything Ed Davey said. But the person I’ve been most impressed with is Carla Denyer, the teeny-tiny confident co-leader of the Green Party.

“All water company bosses to take a dip in British rivers to see how they like it.” “National service to be introduced for all former prime ministers.” “European countries to be invited to join the UK, creating a new ‘Union of Europe.’” Who would disagree with policies like these?

Since, I suppose, the late nineties, every time a General Election comes around, the political parties roll out new websites. Having spent time studying Labour’s 2024 campaign website, I wondered what their previous election websites looked like.

Labour has launched its 2024 General Election manifesto. With a campaign slogan that shouts “Change,” I’d expected they’d replace their lacklustre pre-manifesto website design with something which reflects that message. Today, they released a dramatically different design, which inspires and motivates people to vote for their plans. Just kidding.

The Conservatives launched their 2024 General Election manifesto. Its contents won’t come as any surprise to anyone who’s been following politics recently. Having no new ideas doesn’t mean their designers haven’t attempted to introduce a few of their own on the latest version of their website.

So far, Rishi’s announced the general election to the soundtrack of Things Can Only Get B W etter, spoke to reporters outside the Titanic exhibition (spoiler: It sank,) was photographed under an Exit sign, and accidentally grew big ears after announcing a crackdown on Mickey Mouse university degrees. Yes, it’s all going very well. But, even with all these mishaps, Labour can’t take victory for granted. Sadly, their website design sucks. So, I imagined what I’d make if Labour came calling.

In this week’s General Election campaigning, Reform’s Nigel Farage announced he’s standing for a seat in Clacton after promising everyone he wouldn’t stand as a candidate. Farage popped up on BBC Question Time, which, in fairness, promised they’d invite politicians from other parties. Speaking of novelty candidates, I hope the BBC will stand by their promise and invite someone with real common sense policies like Count Binface. The Count has obviously been too busy conquering the galaxy to get his website ready for the election, so I imagined what I’d make if Count Binface came calling.

Finally, the UK general election campaigns are underway, and the parties are pushing their messages to voters. With the Conservatives desperate to cling to power, Labour anxious to seize it, the Liberal Democrats hoping for more MPs, and Reform looking to claim the far-right vote from the Tories, how do I think their website designs are fairing?

For years now, I’ve kept sauce sachets in my car’s glove box—I mean, who actually keeps gloves in that compartment?—just in case I needed it for a burger or bag of chips. That’s why I was really pleased when The Cheeky Condiment Company got in touch asking me to design a website for their condiment-carrying charm bracelets and necklaces.

I don’t know whether it’s been a reaction to post-Musk Twitter from the people I read and talk with on Mastodon, but there seems to be a renewed interest in personal websites and hosting one’s own content.

This week I’ve been diving deeply into how I approach projects, using a recent design for Zombie Hunt as an example. Yesterday, I wrote about catering for small screens. Today’s all about performance and accessibility considerations when coding my designs.

This week I’m diving deep into how I approach projects, using a recent design for Zombie Hunt as an example. Yesterday, I wrote about designing a layout grid. Today is all about catering for small screens.

This week I’m taking a deep dive into how I approach projects, using a recent design for Zombie Hunt as an example. Yesterday, I wrote about designing dark and light themes.. Today is all about the choices I make when designing a layout grid.

This week I’m diving deep into how I approach projects, using a recent design for Zombie Hunt as an example. Yesterday, I wrote about making decisions about colour. Today is all about using colour across dark and light themes.

Two weeks ago, I took a week—away from work on Nozomi Networks—and spent some time working on a redesign for Zombie Hunt. The team are franchising their successful business and needed a new design to attract customers and potential franchisees.

I’m starting my fourth full year working mainly with Nozomi Networks. I love the people there, the work we’re doing is fascinating, and I enjoy the ability to develop designs over a longer period of time. But, I will have some time available for other projects and I want to use that time to make a difference.

Here’s a quick design tip for making headlines more interesting using text-decoration.

Here’s a quick design tip for improving the readability and style of long passages of running text.

Justin Stahl tweeted, “It’s been tough to recruit product designers with great visual design and an eye for detail. Did we atomic-design-system and product-manager-skills a generation out of having them?” It’s a fair question.

I’m not a framework user. I’ve never once used Bootstrap and I didn’t use 960gs or Blueprint before that. I can understand the benefits of using a framework or off-the-shelf templates, but they weren’t ever for me. Still, I wanted a simple set of layout modules I could call on for design projects, so I developed my own. I call them Layout ❤.

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.

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.

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.

A generation of product and website designers has grown up with 12 or 16 column grids from Bootstrap-style frameworks. In those frameworks, columns are used mostly for aligning content. In my new design for Stuff & Nonsense, I wanted to go beyond that and use a compound grid to influence the entire design.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week 40 and my design this week was again inspired by David King. David King was a British writer, designer and historian of graphic design. He devoted his career to uncovering and chronicling the art of the Soviet and the Constructivist periods, developing posters and graphics for many political groups.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week 39 and my design this week was inspired by Milton Glaser. Milton Glaser was born in 1929 in The Bronx, New York City and throughout his career, he personally designed and illustrated more than 400 posters including a famous psychedelic poster of Bob Dylan.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week 38 and my design this week was again inspired by Saul Bass. In a career which spanned over 40 years, Saul Bass not only designed some of America’s most iconic logos, but also designed title sequences and film posters for some of Hollywood’s best filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese. For Hitchcock, Bass created innovative title sequences for films including North by Northwest, Psycho, and Vertigo. The opening sequence of Mad Men—one of my favourite TV shows—pays homage to Bass who died in 1996 aged 75.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week 37 and my design this week was again inspired by Paula Scher. Paula Scher is an American graphic designer, painter and educator and the first female principal at design firm Pentagram. She is well-known for her distinctive typographic style.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week 36 and my design this week was inspired by David King. David King was a British writer, designer and historian of graphic design. He devoted his career to uncovering and chronicling the art of the Soviet and the Constructivist periods, developing posters and graphics for many political groups.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week 35 and my design this week was inspired by Paula Scher. Paula Scher is an American graphic designer, painter and educator and the first female principal at design firm Pentagram. She is well-known for her distinctive typographic style.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week 34 and my design this week was again inspired by Max Bill. Born in 1908, Max Bill was a Swiss artist, typeface and graphic designer, and industrial designer. He studied at the Bauhaus under Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week 33 and my design this week was inspired by Tibor Kalman. Tibor Kalman was a Hungarian American graphic designer best-known for his work as editor-in-chief of Colors magazine. In 1979, Kalman opened his own studio with the goal of challenging mundane design thinking and creating unpredictable work.

Since going on holiday during July, I’ve fallen behind with my commitment to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. Now II’m back in the studio and II’ve settled back into work, II’m making up for lost time. Here are six new designs, inspired by Otl Aicher, Saul Bass, Ken Garland, and Armin Hofmann.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week 26 and my design this week was inspired by Lester Beall. Lester Beall was an American modernist graphic designer. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Beall moved to Chicago to study and from there to New York. From his farm in Connecticut, he worked on covers and posters which often featured his distinctive use of photomontage.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week 25 and my design this week was inspired by Erik Nitsche. Erik Nitsche was born in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1908 and was a pioneer in the design of books, reports, and other printed materials. In 1955, Nitsche began working as art director at engineering company General Dynamics where he designed a 420-page book on the company’s history entitled Dynamic America.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week 24 and my design this week was inspired by Dan Friedman. Friedman was an American graphic and furniture designer. He studied under Armin Hofmann at the Ulm School of Design and became a major contributor to the new wave typography movement. While working at Pentagram until 1984, Friedman designed letterheads, logos, and posters. Sadly, Friedman died of AIDS in 1995 in New York.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week 23 and my design this week was inspired by Herbert Matter. Matter was a Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer known for his pioneering use of photo-montage in commercial art. His experimental work helped shape the vocabulary of 20th-century graphic design.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week 22 and my design this week was inspired by Emmett McBain. McBain was an African American Graphic Designer who’s work highlighted themes of the African American community and helped bring a positive image of African Americans to the mainstream. He designed impactful advertising, during the Civil Rights era and a series of iconic album covers throughout the sixties and seventies. #blacklivesmatter

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week 21 and my design this week was inspired by art director Alexey Brodovitch.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week twenty and my design this week was inspired by rebellious British designer Neville Brody.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week nineteen and my design this week was again inspired by Italian graphic designer Giovanni Pintori.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week eighteen and my design this week was again inspired by Italian graphic designer Giovanni Pintori.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week seventeen and my design this week was again inspired by Bradbury Thompson.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week sixteen and my design this week was inspired by Italian graphic designer Giovanni Pintori.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week fifteen and my design this week was again inspired by Herb Lubalin.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week fourteen and my design this week was again inspired by Max Huber.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week thirteen and my design this week was inspired by art director and graphic designer David Carson.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week twelve and my design this week was inspired by Swiss born graphic designer Armin Hoffman who is now 99 years old.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. My design this week was again inspired by Max Huber. Huber taught graphic design in the Swiss town of Lugano, which coincidentally is where I stay when I go to work in Switzerland. He died in Mendrisio—where my Swiss office is—in 1992.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. This is week ten and my design this week was inspired by Czechoslovakian born graphic designer and typographer Ladislav Sutnar.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. My design this week was again inspired by graphic designer and typographer Herb Lubalin.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. My design this week was inspired by American modernist graphic designer, Lester Beall.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. My design this week was inspired by Max Huber. Huber taught graphic design in the Swiss town of Lugano, which coincidentally is where I stay when I go to work in Switzerland. He died in Mendrisio—where my Swiss office is—in 1992.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. My design this week was inspired by Alvin Lustig. Lustig’s work as a book, graphic, and typeface designer has been influential long after his death in 1955.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. My design this week was inspired by Bradbury Thompson. Although less well-known than many of his contemporaries, Bradbury Thompson has been called “one of the giants of 20th-century graphic design.”

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. My design this week was inspired by Alexey Brodovitch. You can read more about him and his work in my article for Smashing Magazine.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. My design this week was inspired by “the pioneering female art director you’ve never heard of,” Bea Feitler.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. My design this week was inspired by graphic designer and typographer Herb Lubalin.

For the past six months, I’ve been designing, writing, and presenting a series of Inspired Design Decisions articles and webinars for Smashing Magazine. These have been brilliantly well received and I wanted a regular project to experiment with new designs.

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.

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.

If, on the off chance: You’re reading this entry using Safari Technology Preview 68, and You’ve already upgraded your MacOS to Mojave 10.14, and You’ve selected Dark appearance in System Preferences You’ll have noticed that I’ve implemented a brand new dark mode version of my website.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working with Equfund, refreshing their visual identity, redesigning their website, and developing a consistent brand experience for customers across different channels and touch-points.

One of my earliest blog entries, all the way back in May 2004, was about a favourite technique for creating colour palettes. It was a technique which I’d used for years, even then. Now I have a new take on creating colour palettes, it’s time to revisit that topic.

It’s been a while since I’ve written seriously, but since I started working on my new ‘ Art directing for the web’book, I’ve got the bug. So when Smashing Magazine asked me to write for them again, I couldn’t resist. My latest article, on ‘Art Directing For The Web With CSS Grid Template Areas’ was published today and I’m very pleased with how it turned out. You can read it here.

When I was redesigning my website recently I decided on a tongue-in-cheek new footer. Even though the idea behind my help page was tongue-in-cheek, I’m serious about the advice it gives.

Looking back, I’ve redesigned this website roughly every three years. Today I’m proud to show you the new Stuff & Nonsense.

Back in January I wrote about why I believe that style guides and component/pattern libraries should be beautiful as well as functional. That to be effective, they must cater for the different needs of creative and technical people by inspiring as well as informing.

While I’m finalising the table of contents for my ‘shot,’ I’ve been thinking about the things that I regularly do when I’m ‘Designing with a Browser’, one of which is using the contenteditable attribute in the templates that I share with clients.

I can’t quite believe that it’s been almost two years since we launched the previous, Go, go, go, rillas! design of the Stuff & Nonsense website. Today, I’m very pleased to present our next design, ‘It’s the taste.’

It’s amazing to think that John Allsopp’s oft-quoted article, A Dao of Web Design was published fifteen years ago today. A List Apart asked me what John’s article means to me now, but rather than focus on Dao’s flexible design principles, I wanted to talk about a passage that never seems to get a mention.

Our friends at Code Enigma relaunched their website at DrupalCon in Amsterdam. The launch included the branding we designed for them.

Over the last few months, we’ve been working with a client on the design of a mobile analytics ‘web app.’ I’ll show more of it when we add it to our portfolio, but because lately one or two people have asked me about how we choose colour palettes, I thought I’d share how we came up with the colours for the Elemez app.

I’m a Fireworks man.

Spoiler alert: I’m discussing a theme from the first half of the latest series of Mad Men, season 7, but I don’t mention what happens to major characters. Towards the end of the 1960s, technology had begun to creep into advertising and in ’68, Mad Men’s Sterling Cooper and Partners agency (SC&P) install their first computer, a room-filling, low-humming IBM System/360.

Last week, Cennydd Bowles wrote his Letter to a Junior Designer. It was widely shared and commented on, but while I enjoyed Cennydd sharing his experience—he is, after-all, an experienced product designer—I felt that his message and tone were profoundly negative.

Jeffrey Zeldman on Evolving Responsive Web Design: Some commenters want to use initial-capped Responsive Web Design to mean responsive design as Ethan first defined it, and lowercase responsive design to mean an amorphous matrix of exciting and evolving design thinking. Lyza says soon we’ll stop saying Responsive altogether, a conclusion Andy Clarke reached three years ago.

Jeremy Keith got a little hardboiled yesterday. I particularly like this paragraph that echoes everything I’ve been saying for years about setting wrong expectations:

Loz Gray reflects on his eighteen-months working with the Guardian on their responsive site. There is so much experience here to learn from.

Zeldman in fine form: Never fear, web design generalists: many companies and organizations require your services and always will — from universities still seeking webmasters, to startups seeking seasoned folks with multiple areas of understanding to direct and coordinate the activities of younger specialists. But if jack-of-all web work is feeling stale, now may be the time to up your game as a graphic designer, or experience designer, or front end developer. “Diversify or die” is overstating things when the world needs generalists, too. But “follow the path you love” will always be good advice.

I know I’ve talked about Ghostlab a lot on Unfinished Business and mentioned it a fair few times on Twitter. This isn’t just because its makers Vanamco have sponsored the show. No, I use Ghostlab almost everyday and it’s really made my designing responsive websites much more convenient. As Ghostlab is an app for the Mac, often when I tweet about it I see people complaining that it’s not available for Windows. Well quit your whining Windows users, because today Vanamco have launched Ghostlab for Windows! Ghostlab for Windows has a new interface and is available in both 32 and 64 bit versions. There’s even a free seven day trial and a licence costs just $49 US. Ghostlab for Windows may be just what you were ho, ho, hoping for.

If you’re reading this in RSS, switch over to a browser, as we just launched ‘Go, go, go, rillas!’ It’s our late 2013 version of Stuff and Nonsense.

Brad Frost: As multi-device Web design quickly becomes the norm, the throw-it-over-the-fence style of creating websites is going to be increasingly difficult. The modern Web design process requires intense collaboration between designers and front-end developers. Real collaboration and communication are difficult, but we must get over that awkwardness in order to overcome the design/development divide. His post reminds me a little of my Walls Come Tumbling Down presentation slides and transcript. It is often quite scary how alike our thinking is.

On this week’s Unfinished Business, Alex’s friend Brad Frost and I talked about designing in the open, pro-bono projects for great causes like the Pittsburg Food Bank and the open project he and Melissa are starting for them.

This post is an extract from my chapter in Smashing Book 3, titled ‘Designing Atoms and Elements’ written in March 2012. Has a client ever said to you: “I don’t like the design”?

In January 2012, we began creating this solid, yet flexible, foundation that will help Google’s designers and vendors to produce high quality work that helps strengthen Google’s identity. What you see here is a visual summary of the guidelines A lot of design gold to learn from in Google’s Visual Assets Guidelines. Part two is here. ( Via my mate Dan.)

I’m struggling to believe it quite frankly, but The CSS Zen Garden was planted ten years ago today. I don’t think we should underestimate the importance of The CSS Zen Garden in the history of the web. Its influence still resonates today. Now it’s back accepting submissions and making some of us feel very old.

A year ago I travelled to Oslo in Norway to teach a two day responsive design workshop at FINN. The team there have (obviously) been working hard and yesterday they let me know they’d a new responsive design. It looks great

The Stuff and Nonsense nutty boys header is pretty tall and I decided I wanted to reduce its height for small screens, such as phones, in landscape orientation. When I wrote the CSS to make this happen I made some nutty assumptions. In the spirit of sharing our mistakes:

I hope you enjoyed yesterday’s new, Madness -inspired home page header. We certainly enjoyed making it.

I like to think that at Stuff and Nonsense, our house isn’t so much a place to work as it is a house of fun and although we take the work we do very seriously, we don’t take ourselves too seriously at all. We hope that sense of fun comes across on our site and today we’re putting aside our embarrassment, putting on our baggy trousers and unveiling a new header on our home page.

Jordan Moore (who wears rattlesnake skin shoes) on how to give users the option to “Toggle a Responsive Design On and Off”:

Whenever I’m asked what aspects of design developers should learn, I always answer grid ratios and typography. From now on I’ll also point people to this great little slide deck by Dan Barber.

Today’s Squidfingers.

I’d always admired the work of, and the people behind the Web Standards Project. What they had achieved in only a few short years in bringing browser vendors and tool authors together behind open standards was nothing short of magnificent, so when I was asked to join the project on March 31st 2005 it was an ambition fulfilled.

BLOKK is a font for quick mock-ups and wireframing for clients who do not understand latin. Brilliant! ( via )

I sometimes struggle with creating colour schemes, so this is exactly what I need. Using it on a touch device is fun, or on the desktop try hacking the URL if you have a starting colour in mind and carry on from there. Just replace the hex value with your starting colour, color.hailpixel.com/#fa52a6, ( via )

Dan Mall, following up on Brad Frost: As an industry, we sell websites like paintings. Instead, we should be selling beautiful and easy access to content, agnostic of device, screen size, or context. Reminds me of: Worse still are the expectations that static visuals set in the minds of clients, particularly when designers use these visuals as a method to get sign-off for a design. Is the fact that so many web pages are fixed width and centered a direct result of clients signing off fixed width design visuals? Funny how things come around.

I thoroughly enjoyed hosting another Fashionably flexible responsive web design workshop at New Adventures on Wednesday. I got the feeling that everyone enjoyed the day. I know that I did.

Britain’s first independent television channel, ITV, unveiled both its new logo and a responsive new home page today. I’m a fan of the curvy new logo and how it changes to match a backdrop. The home page is full of thoughtful details too, made all the more interesting to me because my work at STV (the Scottish franchise for ITV) over the last year has tackled many of the same problems.

Two great reads this week, on connected subjects:

Two things about the iPad mini as I’ve owned one since Friday:

You might think — because all the talk at the moment is about seven inch tablets, in particular the iPad mini vs Google’s Nexus 7 vs Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD — that a seven inch tablet was a seven inch tablet was a… Right? Wrong.

Chris (I so want to say “ Stretch ”) Armstrong: Absolute units like pixels effectively give a layout a sell-by date, locking it to a finite resolution range in which it will “work.” Proportional units (ems, rems, and percentages) enable you to define the important relationships between elements, and are a crucial first step on the road to resolution independence.

Thibaut Sailly added an extra dimension to the three-lines responsive navigation icon discussion by suggesting that the three horizontal lines could represent a gesture.

In a fantastic A List Apart double bill, Matt Griffin tackles Responsive Comping: Obtaining Signoff with Mockups: Sending clients in-browser comps is remarkably easy, as it turns out. We just e-mail them a URL. Clients can look at the designs in various browsers and on various devices, resize them, click links and navigation, and check out hover states. Instead of asking our clients to pretend that an image is a website, we show them a website. Keep in mind though, that showing clients a prototype instead of showing them static visuals is about setting realistic expectations and not about designing a browser.

I’m glad that the three-lines icon I suggested first, back in March is now being established as a sort of standard.

Jordan Moore (who has a name like a country singer, but doesn’t like country and can’t sing): There have been calls recently from Andy Clarke and Jeremy Keith to have a standard icon for revealing navigation in small contexts, and rightly so — this is a new technique and we need to set users’ expectations about the consequence of the reveal action.

My design hero, TrentWalton, on how he and his amigos responsively redesigned the Microsoft.com homepage.

There’s been a lot written about device testing over the last year. Jeremy instigating open device testing labs has rightly generated a lot of column inches like Smashing Magazine’s Establishing An Open Device Lab. However, I think we need to be clear just what we mean by testing.

It was January, 2011 and an email arrived from a name I recognised. Would you be available for me to phone you to discuss a potential project? I’ve attached an NDA. Could you sign a printed copy, scan and send it back to me? John Jones Jones Olson

Thank-you to everyone who tweeted and emailed about the site. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive. More than I’d hoped for. And I’d hoped for a lot. Some of the comments came with bugs I need to fix and suggestions for improving the site and its performance overall. I’m really grateful for that. A little bit of follow up from yesterday’s site launch.

If you’re reading this in anything other than a browser, open Chrome, Safari or Firefox (if that’s your thing,) because I’ve designed a new website for Stuff & Nonsense.

I’ve just come home from a ten hot days in Texas, where I had the honour, again, of speaking at An Event Apart alongside some of the best speakers in the industry. I enjoyed the trip, and especially the conference, enormously. I’ve spoken at conferences regularly since my first time (again alongside Jeremy and Jeffrey ) at @media 2005. (I’d never have guessed then that we’d still be friends, still doing this thing, all these years later.) But in the last couple of years I started to enjoy speaking less and emotional risk/reward ratio that goes with public speaking tipped too much toward risk. So I decided to not speak at all in 2012. That is until Jeffrey persuaded me to speak in Austin. Unlike Jeremy, this wasn’t my first not-SXSW visit to Austin as Elliot, Simon, Tim and I and a bunch of design globetrotters went there to redesign a bank a few years ago. I’m glad I went. Every An Event Apart conference feels special, but at this one the (unplanned) recurring themes were spooky. My talk was about designing, design process and particularly how our conventional design tools — drawing tools like Fireworks and Photoshop — are not equipped for designing today’s web. They’re ‘Bringing a knife to a gunfight!’ From the website: In the mid-nineties, when designers started making their mark on the web, they did it with software tools and processes that they’d brought with them from print. But the web’s a different place now than it was ten, five, even two years ago; the tools and processes we’ve relied on for years are no longer capable of properly designing today’s flexible, responsive web. In this session, we’ll find new ways to design that better serve the needs of today’s responsive web, and investigate better, alternative tools and approaches to design. We’ll learn too how new tools and approaches can improve communication between designers and developers and our clients. I hear that the talk was well received and I had a great time giving it. In fact, it’s definitely helped me to get my speaking mojo working again. For everyone not at An Event Apart in Austin: I’ve uploaded my slides on Speaker Deck Here’s a list of the URLs from the talk too.

In the later part of last year, my good friend and colleague David Roessli and I started a new project together — to redesign ISO, the International Organization for Standardization. I wrote about it a little in November 2011.

CodePen is all about front end code inspiration, education, and sharing. Like Dribbble for code? I like it. A lot.

I had looked forward to it for a year and it certainly didn’t disappoint. For me, this year’s SXSW Interactive was the best so far. Every year seems to be a little different.

This morning when I opened my inbox, I found a flurry of messages discussing the Britpack and what it is, could and shouldn’t be and about whether or not the wider perception of it was elitist and somehow harmful.

The end of this week sees web design masterminds, mobsters and even petty criminals heading to Austin for SXSW. It’s like Parkhurst for design geeks.

So Web Directions North has wrapped and tomorrow we head to the mountains for a spot of cold weather sports activity (or probably in my case, my lips around a nice hot chocolate). But first, other news.

Packed: Passport, toothbrush, Mac, pants, socks, toasted sandwich maker iPod. I think I’m ready: Web Directions North here I come. I’m heading out on Sunday.

I had thought that months of solid writing Transcending CSS would have left my ink a little dried out. But an offer to write a series of articles for Informit on Creating Inspired Design was one that was too good to pass up.

Over on Digital Web, Carolyn Wood asked Colly, Andy Clarke said recently that what always impressed him about sites designed by you is that you don’t limit yourself to the normal CSS layout conventions.

So I’m sat infront of my Mac yesterday and at about 4.30, the phone rang. Now I’ve written before about telephone salesmen, but this was a call with a difference. Caller: Hi, my name is Roger Daltrey from Who’s Better Software.

I’m always inspired by Veerle’s Adobe Illustrator tutorials. But Illustrator is a tool that I’ve never really used beyond its rudementary features and I’m inspired to learn more.

Despite owning several iPods including a 60Gb that contains my entire music collection, all six Star Wars movies and a multitude of other files, the new iPod Shuffle is such a thing of beauty that I just had to have one.

This morning I returned from a (literally) flying visit to New York where I had the very real pleasure of visiting my friends at AOL and speaking at their Design and Programming Offsite event.

It’s been a while since I wrote about CSS on And All That Malarkey, ( Ed says: It’s been a while since you wrote about anything here Malarkey!.) I’ve been busy documenting some of my working methods and thought that I would share Stuff and Nonsense’s current…

Last week I came back from a (semi) working trip to New York. As it’s been nine years since I was last in the city, I did all the usual tourist attractions (Empire State Building, Circle Line cruise, Central Park) and I ate hot-dogs and donuts and bagels and…

With Web Directions South and Fundamentos Web now both done and dusted, I have only one public event left before the end of this year. You might think that attending conferences regularly would mean that I have heard what is on offer from speakers.

Following much of the discussion over the future, activities and progress of the W3C over recent weeks, Mozilla’s David Baron, a member of the W3C’s CSS Working Group has published a long and detailed examination of what he believes are the conflicting…

As I’ve just been invited to speak at a web conference in Canada next year, I thought that it was about time that I updated my biography. Looking back at what I have written before, it all seemed a little bland; designer this, accessibility that.

the CSS Working Group is finally aware that it must include at least one classically trained artist and graphic designer on the team.

I invited thirty celebrity CSS chefs to collaborate in baking a single stylesheet. Now the bell has rung, the oven mitts are at the ready and our Too Many Cooks (Dvorak special) is ready to come out of the oven. But first, an open letter to Mr. Dvorak.

After his altogether brilliant article Why CSS Bugs Me, I’m officially designating this week to be John C. Dvorak week. To help Mr.

Bert Bos man Bos has informed me that those boffins (Ed says Oxford English Dictionary: Brit, colloq, a person engaged in scientific research ) at the W3C are offering places at a W3C Webinar on Mobile Web Design.

Hicks’ (justifiable) excitement about his logo design article appearing in.net magazine (#152 August) has brought back memories for Malarkey.

Even after only the briefest of spells travelling in the USA this year, I became accustomed to those creature comforts that make a travelling designer’s life so much easier.

These last few days I’ve been looking back on @media2006; 800 people, two amazing days and one designer left feeling very humbled by the whole experience.

I’m not a user of many web 2.0 applications, although the few that I have bonded with, including Basecamp, Blinksale, Flickr and Ma.gnolia, I use pretty extensively.

A dissertation evaluating the awareness of web accessibility amongst UK small businesses. Student Andy Higgs has written an excellent dissertation on ‘ Web Accessibility In UK Small Businesses ’.

I would like to thank everyone who organised and attended IceWeb 2006. It has been a privilege to have been asked to present my two sessions, How To Be A Web Design Superhero and Feeding your Creativity without Compromising User Needs.

With everything else that has been going on lately, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything much about CSS. It’s not that I’m any less interested in CSS; infact s e ven’s recent Beta has me more excited than ever about what we will be able to do on a…

April 27th and 28th will see me wrapping up warm, as I’m heading to Iceland for IceWeb 2006; billed as Iceland’s premier web oriented conference.

Today I opened my email to find a passionate plea for help from a web designer looking to find good books or articles on web design.

With blue suede shoes on his feet and Viva Las Vegas ringing in his ears, Malarkey can’t help falling in love with Vegas as he reports from Microsoft’s MIX06 conference.

SXSWi, The Web Standards Project is changing, entering a new time in its history, opening the hive up to better include the communities and issues we’ve done our black and gold best to represent since 1998.

So it’s done. This morning Mr. Budd and I presented How To Be A Web Design Superhero at SXSWi. For budding superheroes, our presentation slides are now online (PDF 13.5Mb). I want to say a great big thank-you to everyone for coming, Mr.

I am so pleased today to announce that a new beta build of IE7 (I call it the MIX 06 release) will be available from MIX 06, March 20th to 22nd. The new browser will be handed out at MIX and will then hopefully be available from MSDN.

A busy few months of travel are ahead in Malarkey world. I’m very much looking forward to what’s coming up, to meeting old friends and making new ones.

With awareness of standards and accessibility being raised by groups such as WaSP, companies and organisations across many sectors have adopted standards. Sometimes their decision to do so might have been commercial, other times out of a need to comply.

In the news this week, three times winner of the Tour De France and occassional web designer Jeffrey Veen announced that MeasureMap has been acquired by Yahoo, AltaVista, Starbucks, Google.

In the news this week, three times winner of the Tour De France and occassional web designer Jeffrey Veen announced that MeasureMap has been aquired by Yahoo, AltaVista, Starbucks, Google.

Back in October 2005, the Internet Explorer team urged developers to begin removing CSS hacks in favour of conditional comments.

So, according to those slipping the new IE7 Beta Preview out of it’s sleeve and slapping it down on the music-center, Internet Explorer 7 breaks my site. I can’t say that this was much of a surprise.

A new year and tv commercial breaks are full of advertisements for partworks magazines. The choice is so vast that I really don’t know which ones to choose.

Today I heard a rumour that there’s gonna be something big happening in London this summer. When I say big, I mean big and pulled off by some of the biggest names in the business.

Mickey Spillane, Frank Miller, Hakon Wium Lie: Three of my favourite thriller writers. No really, because alongside Spillane’s’My Gun Is Quick’ and Miller’s’The Hard Goodbye’, another thriller hit the book stores web just in time for Christmas; Lie’s CSS3…

Way back when, I listed my favourite top ten phrases that people search for to find my site. Now thanks to the wonders of MeasureMap, it’s time for ten more.

I’ve alluded to it recently, and now after not much blood but one or two tears I’m ready to show and tell. The new design for Karova.com is out there. The new site is geared towards promoting Karova’s development framework).

At the beginning of last month I advocated a quiet revolution and wrote, Fighting a solitary campaign for standards within any organisation must lead inevitably to frustration if the responses are either negative or apathetic.

Many thanks for all the kind birthday wishes over the weekend, it’s not everyday that you reach […];). By way of a thank-you to all the kind people that I have met and others who occassionally stumble drunk across my site, here is a layout experiment which I…

As I head for London, I thought that you might like a sneaky peek at the presentation slides which I have prepared for next week’s Carson Workshop’s CSS For Designers events.

Over the last few weeks I have had several interesting conversations with web standards enthusiasts who work within institutions.

With Molly and I in session for Carson Workshops in only a few weeks and our presentation materials near completion, I have become interested in what audiences need or expect from presentation slides.

As standards enthusiasts, I think that we are often guilty of a little navel gazing when it comes to web design. In many open discussions on WSA or Style Gala, the conversation can often turn to the importance of semantics and validation and sometimes (not…

Released today, Paul Weller’s new album As Is Now isn’t the return to form which I expected. It’s better. A tour-de-force! Weller at his most spectacular for almost ten years.

It was announced yesterday that one of the most influential artists of the British 1960’s art movement, Patrick Caulfied, died on Thursday.

(This one sneaked out while I was teaching in Cupertino) As a studio we work on a number of e-commerce projects each year.

I’m sorry to all my overseas friends (and possibly those of you under 30) who probably won’t have the faintest clue what I’m talking about, but the BBC Doctor Who web site last week announced the return of the Doctor’s once faithful dog, K9.

I love a good book and nothing helps me relax more than disappearing into a good crime or mystery novel. Mickey Spillane, Elmore Leonard, Colin Dexter, all great story tellers who keep you guessing right up until the last few pages.

A major brand name redesigning and implementing their web site with web standards can still be big news. When that brand belongs to one of the most influential sites of modern web design, the news is bigger.

My copy of Professional CSS arrived on my desk this morning and I was very proud to read chapter eight in which Ethan discusses stylesheet switching and Invasion of the Body Switchers.

With the launch of the Dutch after school club standards group Happy Clog and the proliferation of WaSP working groups, it seems that (maybe for warmth) standards geeks and designers are cuddling up.

One of the things which I love so much about southern France is colour, the way in which man-made colours are affected by the elements and in particular the strength of the sun.

I’m back. Tanned, rested, fired-up and ready with news of a special design and CSS workshop event happening in November in old London town.

I’m very lucky. I get to work with some great clients and I’m currently working with a very cool consultancy company. Part of the brief was to do something which no one in his industry had done before and I wanted this to involve code as well as design.

Travelling around the London Underground, it is difficult not to notice a series of posters for the British Legion’s Victory Thanks campaign. Among all the advertising for theatres and stores, these Victory Thanks posters stand out as striking and evocative.

Accessibility is a hot topic again with many mature and interesting discussions taking place. Now the Web Standards Project (WaSP) announces the WaSP Accessibility Task Force.

Positive steps which governments could take to promote a more rapid move towards an accessible web. Following on from Accessibility and a society of control;

Since I delivered my (slightly modified) Anatomy of a Mouse presentation at @media2005, I’ve had time to formalise my thinking about my answer to one of the questions from the audience.

It’s amazing what people buy and sell on eBay. A quick Google reveals some crazy fools, with some of my favourites including someone selling (and bidding on) a Russian military patrol boat (No sale though, the highest bid of $85,100 did not meet minimum…

Well, it’s a wrap. @media2005 has drawn to a close tonight and a four hour train journey back to Wales has given me not only the chance for a bit of a snooze, watch Mona Lisa on my iBook but gather my thoughts about the last couple of days of what I hope…

Dateline London. Later this month, Waterloo in South London will be the place to be as the great and the good gather and @media 2005 rolls into town.

It’s now only two weeks until @media2005 in London, and the (now sold out) event looks set to be one of the biggest web occassions the UK has seen so far. It will be interesting to see how @media’s style differs in comparison to SXSW.

Working with other designers or developers on any project can often be tricky. But imagine what it would be like if there were 29 other people working on the same CSS file!

In Too Many Cooks I invited 30 designers and developers to contribute to a single CSS file. It has been interesting to see the CSS styles roll in and now we have a finished result.

I’ve been passed the baton by John Oxton in a new musical pass the parcel, so I thought I’d use this to explore the depths of my record collection. 9.65Gb on my PC laptop. (Oh how I’m looking forward transfering it to my (soon to be arriving) iBook.)

I want to say a huge thank-you for all the kind comments about my new design. As you can imagine, a lot of time goes into making a total redesign, and often designing for yourself is harder than designing for client projects.

Applying id and (multiple) class attributes to the element is a fantastic way to turn the same XHTML configuration into multiple design layouts without the need for adding different attributes to div elements.

It’s here. I’ve been meaning to redesign this site for a little while now and since I have emerged from my black, depressive state, the urge was getting too strong to ignore. I just had to do it.

Whereas many have already publicly switched from MovableType to other brands of blogging software, some for technical and others for economic reasons, I am sticking to MT.

Well, I’ve been hinting at it for a little while now and now here it is, an all new And All That Malarkey. Not simply a lick of paint, but a complete new design, ground-up re-code and a CSS shake-up.

Some of you may remember that one of my first (and most visited) columns way back in May last year was about creating colour palettes from only two colours plus black and white.

With less than a month to go until the General Election, here in the UK you can’t seem to get away from inanely grinning politicos squeezing palms and kissing babies for the cameras.

I wrote a little while ago about the UK Labour Party’s early campaign posters and now with the capitalist scam democratic process well underway here, I thought I’d take a look at what the UK Conservative Party is hoping will grab our attention and make us…

As some of you might know, I like to work on e-commerce store designs. Part of what fascinates me about making sites designed to do business is the psychology of designing for e-commerce.

Drive through most towns in the UK (and probably elsewhere in the world) and you’ll see a hairdresser in the main street.

Image replacement is a topic which keeps reappearing on websites and in books. There are whole sections devoted to the pros and cons of each method in books such as Web Standards Solutions and The Zen of CSS Design.

I’ll never be able to show my face in Austin again, and I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise publically to… All that’s left to say is an enormous thank-you to everyone who made me and the rest of the Brit Pack sooooo welcome in Texas.

SXSW was the venue for Ethan Marcotte to announce the up-and-coming publication of Professional CSS, a new book by Christopher Schmitt, Dan Cederholm, Porter Glendinning, Mark Trammell, Dunstan Orchard and Ethan himself.

A while ago (when I couldn’t sleep), I sat up late watching re-runs of home decorating shows on UK TVStyle, a channel wall-to-wall with house make-overs.

Back in November I was approached for an interview by a very nice chap from Japan, Yasuhisa Hasegawa, who was writing a book on design and web standards. I’m sure that Yasuhisa won’t mind me quoting a little bit from his email to me.

I’ve written in previous columns about how working with wire-frames and grey-box page layouts during a site’s planning and early design stages can improve efficiency and enable client sign-off points.

Some of you may recall that way back in June last year, Stuff and Nonsense grew up, moved away from home and got a place of its own. I wasn’t so sure about the move at the time, but (happily) I was proved wrong and it’s been a good move.

It’s always gratifying when someone calls or emails out-of-the-blue and says something like, Can you do… for us?. It’s even nicer when that person is halfway across the world.

I’ve been experimenting with a’magazine contents’ or news style page for a current project and thought I’d give it a whirl here.

Oooo, how I envy real artistic talent - to be able to create a piece of artwork from nothing more than paper or canvas, pencils or paints is a talent I wish I had more of.

OK, if you enjoyed the last one (and I hope you did) here is another. In case you missed it, you probably know how it is, you’re just sitting down to dinner (perhaps in front of your favourite TV show) when the phone rings, Hello, can I speak to the person…

Oh my kiddy aunt, it’s started already. Driving through Warrington yesterday, I caught my first glimpse of the UK Labour Party’s first campaign posters for the up-and-coming (to a church hall near you) General Election.

As a company, we give each member of the team a ’25.00 per month allowance to spend at Amazon on anything they think will benefit the company. We don’t vet what people buy, it’s a way of encouraging them to expand their knowledge (and our range of skills).

It seems to be the season for discussion on rips, with Shaun Inman and Dave Shea both again highlighting design theft and the most professional methods for dealing with such occurrances. I’m not interested in going over old ground.

London is most definately the place to be in June this year. Why? Well @media2005, that’s why! With speakers including Jeffrey Zeldman, Joe Clark, Douglas Bowman, Patrick Griffiths, Andy Budd, Jeremy Keith and, err, me … this looks like the web event of the…

Jason Santa Maria recently published a highly insightful article Fighting Off Design Stagnation in the latest issue of Design In-Flight magazine. This is the first time I have read DIF and I am genuinely impressed.

Whether working alone or as part of a team, there are many separate tasks in any project. If you are working as a team it is important that everybody involved understands the structural requirements needed to implement a design, and even if working alone it…

When I was working (on my own) in the studio between Christmas and New Year, I played the Live Aid DVD which the guys bought me for my birthday.

We are in the final stages of completing our project for Young Flintshire, an initiative for young people in the county. And the process of design has taken many things from the stuff that I have talked about this week.

Most recently, Paul Chadwick has recieved much critical acclaim for his work on comic-book movie tie-ins such as Star Wars and the Matrix.

I love comic books (you might have guessed that already), not just because of the stories or the artwork (or because I long to wear a cape and jump off the wardrobe), but because I admire the’process’ and teamwork which goes into creating them.

Two of my favourite comic books artists excel in black and white illustration, the first, Frank Miller is better known for his work on Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and more recently, Sin City.

When I didn’t know what colour to put down, I put down black. Black is a force: I depend on black to simplify the construction.

Testing a site design to ensure the widest practical audience should be an essential part of the design process on every web site. Of course in an ideal world, every web site developed would be tested both for usability and accessibility using real people.

I’ve been meaning to write more about my current thoughts on accessibility for a while now. In the last week I received (among many) some interesting emails on the subject and this has spurred me into writing.

NB: This article refers to a prior version of the WWF UK online store that I designed in 2004. I was pleased to learn yesterday that our work has won the ECMOD 2004 (European Catalogue and Mail Order Days) Best Charity/Good Cause Related Catalogue Award for…

I thought that it might be fun to talk a bit more about design for a while rather than standards, and release a few work-in-progress designs for sites that will be launched in the next few weeks.

Here it is, the new Stuff and Nonsense portfolio site. I always find it hard to design our own company portfolio site. So this time I took a different approach and decided to concentrate on the content first and let content dictate the design.

Saturday afternoon was spent in pleasant company at Tate Modern, walking the galleries and thumbing through hefty books in the shop. Conversations were often focussed on the arts and there were some very thought provoking works to see.

it made me sit back and wonder if’we’ in the web-standards’community’ have anything left to say about standards. It’s been a short, but busy few years since deploying standards for day-to-day, commercial web ventures became practical.

Photographers commonly use depth-of-field to emphasise certain parts of image by de-focusing others such as backgrounds. Our eyes are naturally drawn to the sharpest part of any image.

(For the non-Brits (or anyone too young to remember), the picture is actor Robert Lindsay in the BBC’s 1977 sit-com, Citizen Smith written by John Sullivan who went on to write Only Fools and Horses.

I’ve been thinking about making a CSS Zen Garden entry for a little while now, but before I think about design, I wanted to understand the Garden’s XHTML structure.

Day four: I couldn’t say thank-you enough to all the people who left kind comments about the 2004 Disney Store UK project, here, at CSS Beauty, CSS Vault, and Style Gala.

Day three: I ran through how the 2004 Disney Store UK was developed, looking specifically at XSLT. The 2004 Disney Store UK website was developed using an ecommerce platform called Karova Store.

Day one: A skip through some of the markup and styles I used on the 2004 Disney Store UK store. One of the things that I found fascinating then about working with CSS was the application of new techniques to solve the real dilemmas which crop up during a site…

It was a busy ten days in the web-standards world. Jeffrey Zeldman was a new dad (congratulations) and Dave and Doug made big noises in Australia at Web Essentials. Here was my news in October 2004.

It’s been a very busy few months in Malarkey world. (I’ve got a big announcement to make tomorrow.) Anyway, as our American cousins have been splashing blood around their sites in the run up to Halloween, I thought that I would splash a little colour around…

When awarding the latest version of the Mozilla site a WSA Silver Star, Johan pointed to the mozilla.org Markup Reference.

I’ve just awarded my first Silver Star over at the Web Standards Awards. My award goes to the edgy and unconventional Red Labor. Now I’m not going to make a habit of posting awarded sites both here and on WSA. This is the first time and definately the last.

Following on from the recent discussion about accessible alternatives for complex graphics and images, Bob Easton made an interesting point which compounds browsers’ lousy support for the longdesc attribute, Yet another reason to avoid LONGDESC … There is…

Forget Superman or the Hulk, the Fantastic Four or (God forbid) Captain America! When I was a kid there was only one comic book hero, the mighty Judge Dredd.

I need your advice on something please guys, if you can spare the time. I started this site for a number of reasons, most of them pretty half-baked.

This is likely to be my last column before I take off for France on Saturday for a two week holiday with Sue and Alex. We have just completed a small site redo for a long standing client, the Empire Hotel in Llandudno, North Wales.

In 2004—after eight weeks, 1,600 cups of coffee, 1,920 cigarettes, 16 pork sausages and one instant BBQ—I was pleased to announce the launch of a new online store for WWF UK.

Stuff and Nonsense is in the final stages of testing a new e-commerce store for a client (more about that when the site goes live on Wednesday).

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about fluid layout design over recent weeks and have made it my goal to attempt fluid (or fluid/elastic hybrid) layouts with each new design. And you know what? It’s a damn site harder than I thought it would be.

In a recent conversation with Swedish web accessibility advocate Tommy Olsson, Tommy impressed on me again the importance of fluid, rather than the more commonly used fixed-width design techniques that I and so many others designers favour.

A discussion at Accessify got me thinking about the usefulness of compliance badges or icons. What purpose do they serve the public who have little knowledge or interest in accessibility or code validity?

Web forms often ask users for both essential and non-essential (marketing purposes and research) information. Long and complicated forms can often slow down the progress through a web site and in the case of e-commerce, can seriously hinder the sales process.

Looking back at an old site I made for a client made my rethink the way that that I have been coding my sites over recent months. So much so, that I thought I’d look again at the code structure of this blog and redevelop the HTML in a totally different way.

Simon Collison opened a can of worms recently when his (rather fantastic) personal site launched with the now famous’ticks’ for visited navigation links.

Eric Meyer’s recent comments about my original What’s in a name column have prompted me draw some conclusions from the comments and suggestions made on And All That Malarkey and elsewhere. First I want to lay a few ghosts to rest.

Forgive me if you think that I’m a lot obsessed with colour and with Macromedia Fireworks at the moment. If you’re bored with both these topics, play with this instead.;).

In the first of an occassional column on one of my favourite graphics applications (the largely under-rated) Macromedia Fireworks, I thought I’d write about how I often use a combination of Fireworks MX and XML to create a site-full of graphical text headers…

I love you. I have loved you as far back as I can remember. I think I have always loved you. I visit you many times every day and sometimes when I am sleeping, I dream that you come to visit me too.

A number of designers and developers have asked me for recommendations on how to layout product range pages using semantic mark-up and CSS. So I decided to write a mini tutorial for our training manual and try it out here first.

Cum on Eng-er-laaand! It’s only five days until our boys take on France in Euro 2004. So to get us in the mood for some superb footy action, here is my Web Imitates Football Quiz. Can you guess which European team strips inspired these colour palettes?

I have been pondering whether or not to replace my personal design machine with a shiny new Apple PowerBook. A new Mac will certainly give me the power and flexibility that I need and looks sooooo sexy too!

Andy Budd wrote about Semantic Coding and said, This got me thinking about the benefits of naming conventions and I began to realise that these conventions matter, not just for the sake of web designers (and easier site redesigns), but for users too!

An eagerness to please should always push a designer to do the best for a client. But there are times where just when you thought the job was finished, a client will say, Can we just add… The four stage sign-off sheet can be our best friend.

As part of a current young peoples’ project for our local Flintshire Council, Stuff and Nonsense has commissioned the talents of a young illustrator, Holly, to design a cast of characters for a new web site.

I can’t think of many web sites that don’t include at least one form, and I can’t think how many times I have compromised on a form’s visual design because of looming deadlines, leaving a Must get around to styling this form properly comment in the code.

Today I discovered that the fantastic Cameron Adams had nominated our work for Goppa Fireplaces for a Web Standards Award. My smile got so big that my face almost split, thanks Cameron!

My recent post on creating colour palettes, combined with a conversation on painting with my friend Sue, (a Fine Art student at Liverpool University) got me thinking more about colour inspiration for web design.

Over the weekend, I installed iTunes on all the computers in the design studio and centralised our entire CD collection on the server.

Standards-based designers often appear to loath Microsoft’s behemoth browser, sometimes for good reasons. Internet Explorer’s patchy support for W3C CSS (particularly attribute selectors), its non support for the abbr tag or PNG transparency on the Windows…

When I am designing a colour scheme for a client site, I am often lead by the colours used in existing logos or publicity materials. But when the client only uses one or two colours, I use a favourite technique for creating complimentary tones.

Way back when the web was young and active volcanos spewed molten rock into the sea just north of Morecambe, I dodged falling boulders and lava flows and headed into my local bookcave.

When I sold my shares in Karova earlier this year, many people wrote to me asking whether or not I was still using Karova Store (KS2) accessible, css based e-commerce software for my clients and whether I would still recommended it to them.

Back in June 2004, I wrote about a new chapter in the story of Stuff and Nonsense, the design company that I have owned since 1998. It was at that time that I combined the running of the two businesses that I owned, Stuff and Nonsense and Karova.

It is the first new month after the relaunch of And All That Malarkey and for the redesign I introduced a new Editorials category. As a single author site, you might be wondering why there is a need for such a category.

Carson Workshops have announced a second day and limited availability for the CSS for Designers Workshop in London. I am very pleased that demand for seats at the workshop has been so high as to require a second day.

About thirty years ago, my Mum had a friend called Reg, an ex-army chappy with a gruff manner and a rhodesian ridgeback dog called Simba. It was a huge creature. But this is not about Reg, or his dog.

With the many excellent design and CSS resources and blogs available, there seems little point in my humbly chiming in. Nor can I compete with the staggering talents of Shaun or Jon.

While conferences are still at the front of my thoughts, I thought it about time to announce the WOW Web Design and Project Management Conference in Silicon Valley in September.

I was very pleased to have been invited by Bert Bos to briefly speak alongside him and AOL’s Kevin Lawver at WWW2006 in Edinburgh.

My small contribution to 24ways, Z’s not dead baby, Z’s not dead blinks sleepily into the daylight today. The use of positioning together with z-index has been a little out of favour recently.