It's been a funny old year

Posted in Freelancing News on 14 October 2010 | Comments

Earlier in the year, I found myself twiddling my thumbs on a few occasions when freelance web design work seemed to be very slow. Of course, I was actually doing other things, trying to generate new business, working on personal projects etc, so I wasn’t exactly idle. Nevertheless, it was a quiet period between spring and summer.

Since then, I’ve been so busy that it’s felt like my feet haven’t touched the floor on a few occasions. I think this is what they call the Feast or Famine cycle (see also How to Avoid Feast or Famine Cycle). This has made it a lot more difficult to keep publishing articles here but I plan to rectify that in the next few months with some smaller ‘tips and tricks’ posts. Hope you like ‘em.

What I did in my summer holidays: One of the personal sites I started during my quiet time was Clive Goes Cycling where I have been publishing cycling-related articles. For this, I’ve concentrated on the content so the design is a WordPress theme by StudioPress. Hat tip to them for the clean design!

Internet Explorer 9 is coming

Posted in News CSS3 on 29 September 2010 | Comments [2]

Internet Explorer 9 has been released in beta form with a full release due in the next few months. As a web designer and front end developer, I’ve been looking forward to the new browser because it promises to support more CSS3 properties than IE8. Many of these properties have been supported by other browsers, such as Firefox, Safari and Chrome, for some time – so we are now getting to a stage where a lot of CSS3 methods and properties will be visible across a wider range of browsers. Hurrah!

Impressive Webs has summarised the CSS3 support in IE9 and it’s great to see properties like border-radius, box-shadow, opacity and RGB(a) colours supported. Of course, your design will determine whether you decide to use border-radius for rounded corners or box-shadow for subtle shadow effects but I predict a big increase in usage of these over the next year or so. Even if these do not make it into your final designs, the ease in which you can try them out and show to clients makes a great deal of sense. Of course, you could use these properties before now, and I know that websites need not look the same in all browsers, but I’ve always had problems convincing clients that some design elements would only be visible to a relatively small audience. Not any more.

Previously: CSS3 box-shadow and image hover effects · Making circles with CSS3 border-radius

Information is beautiful, it really is!

Posted in News on 5 September 2010 | Comments

Last Friday, I attended dConstruct, which is a web design and development conference in Brighton, UK. One of the presentations that really grabbed me was Information is Beautiful by David McCandless (@mccandelish) who gave a fascinating description of ways that data can be visualised. Not just to make it look pretty in an infographical sense but also to reveal new data patterns and correlations.

The presentation featured several of the the data visualisations on David McC’s website. Have a look. These examples are really excellent. In particular, Planes or Volcano and [in a lighter vein] If Twitter was 100 People.

The true beauty of these visualisations is they reveal more about the data. Fantastic work!

Book: Information is Beautiful by David McCandless · TED Presentation: The Beauty of Data Visualisation – this is another version of the presentation by David McC. It’s well worth watching.

New Adventures in Web Design conference

Posted in News Conference on 29 July 2010 | Comments [2]

I’m always on the look-out for good value web design conferences with great speakers and New Adventures in Web Design in Nottingham in January 2011 satisfies both those criteria. It looked so good when I first heard about it that I ignored my usual procrastination(!) and booked straight away.

The conference has been organised by Simon Collison who has attracted a range of big name speakers and put together what looks like a fast-paced schedule that includes two discussion slots. I’m really looking forward to it.

If you are attending the conference, I hope to see you there!

London Web Standards Group meet-up

Posted in Web standards News on 13 July 2010 | Comments

Yesterday evening, I attended a London Web Standards Group meeting which was a Q and A with Andy Budd about UX. The meeting took place in a pub called the The Square Pig and about 40-50 people turned up.

It’s the first time I have been to this group’s meetings and I really enjoyed it. The Q and A was good and everything was very informal. Before and after the Q and A, I had some interesting chats with a few folks including David Powers, Rob Enslin, Andy Budd, Rupert Bowman, and Romily Jones. Many thanks to Jeff Van Campen for chairing the meeting.

If you are interested in web standards and talking with other developers/designers, I strongly recommend the meetings. I am planning to go again. Might see you there!

Update: Here are the slides from the meeting (including the questions) and another write-up. Steve Workman has summarised the questions and answers (and with nice sketch notes as well!)