May 2013
8 posts
Tail wagging - Matt Gemmell →
10 Years - CSS Zen Garden is Back →
For all those people who were designing websites 10 years ago! I still had the book on my shelf until about six months ago.
Save bandwidth with webP – soon with fallback! →
FROONT - Responsive web design, the visual way →
“Participants rated their sexual orientation on a 10-point scale, ranging from...”
– New study indicates homophobia is often a result of repressed homosexual feelings, validating what Freud posited in his concept of “reaction formation,” in which we lash out against others’ expressions of what we loathe in ourselves.
April 2013
5 posts
Watch
demo to explain chained transforms ✿ →
March 2013
8 posts
The weekend effect →
Interesting effect on gov.uk traffic thanks, presumably, to the use of work machines running IE 8/9 and home machines running Chrome or iOS Safari.
Field Study: Stop Stealing My Style, Bro →
I’m guilty of quickly clicking when someone calls design theft. It’s the closest thing to soap-opera-esque drama that an industry full of type and color obsessed kern-wads will ever get to. When we see the fight, we come running like it’s a schoolyard brawl where we’re all secretly hoping for…
“I am of the opinion that the boldest measures are the safest”
– Horatio Nelson
February 2013
7 posts
1 tag
“If you’re not ashamed of what you did three to six months ago,...”
– Laura Kalbag
Ice breakers are harmful to the learning process →
January 2013
24 posts
2 tags
Front-end performance for Web Designers
I’ve just read this really interesting article by Harry Roberts. It’s well worth the read for some context, but here’s a summary of the main points.
Put styles in the <head>.
Put scripts at the bottom.
Make fewer HTTP requests.
Serve images & JS from different domains to increase parallelisation. Don’t do this with CSS.
Ignore the above rule if you’re...
“I don’t believe in market research. I don’t believe in marketing the way it’s...”
– Iconic Designer Massimo Vignelli on Intellectual Elegance, Education, and Love
5 tags
What's good design? (and gov.uk)
For a long while, I’ve had a bit of a thing for eye candy and swooshey effects. As a designer, I’ve tried hard to avoid overcomplicating designs just because I want to get my fix of eye candy.
I’ve recently been doing a lot of work using type and blocks of colour, and have consequently been playing a lot with layout. My recent acquisition of a bigger-than 13.3” screen (I...
Sinatra and Heroku tips →
1 tag
“The best designers and developers rarely have more talent. They simply have more...”
– Andy Budd
1 tag
“Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires...”
– Susan Sontag on courage and resistance
“I once talked to an old South-Sea cannibal who, hearing of the Great War raging...”
– Bronsilaw Malinowski, Readers Digest, 1938
“I am much more likely to become a fan of or “like”, or tweet a link...”
– Where Link Building is Heading in 2013
1 tag
Advanced Google search modifiers
I’ve been on a three- or four-day mission to understand SEO a little better than I do at the moment, and as part of that, I’m using google an awful lot. Here are some of the “advanced” search modifiers I’ve been using. These, coupled with the minus modifier can give an enourmous ammount of power when searching.
Term
Use
~
Returns Similar Results to the...
The Best Length for a Description Tag is Longer... →
Interesting for anyone into SEO.
3 tags
Adventures in SEO: Get the number of google...
I’ve been doing some keyword analysis for the last few days and as well as using Google’s fantastic Keyword Tool and Google Trends, I’ve been building a spreadsheet with various bits of data about the keywords I’m looking at.
Using Excel to open an HTML table
I initially had a bit of trouble getting data out of the AdSense Keywords tool, but Microsoft Excel came to the rescue…
Faced with an HTML...
Question: Where will you get your idea?
Answer: From my customers. Dane Maxwell taught me about the concept of idea extraction. Instead of trying to come up with an idea yourself, you talk to a market, let’s say photographers, and try to find what painful problems they have that could be solved with software. Then when you find a problem you not only have an idea for what to build, but also a first customer. My most successful software projects have been someone else’s idea, talking to Dane was just the first time someone had explained it so clearly. I’ll write more on this topic in future posts.
“It takes 66 repetitions to create a solid habit.”
