February 2012
3 posts
Where are the Androids?
I was thinking this yet again just the other day after observing yet another train carriage full of white-earbudded travellers, merrily swiping and tapping their way home on various apple branded gadgets.
In a carriage full of people using mobile devices the ratio was easily 10:1 in favour of Apple. This plays out pretty much everywhere I go - and yet Android numbers claim to be putting a dent in...
A better responsive image format
One thing that cropped up during a discussion on how better to handle responsive images at the responsive summit last week was an idea I put forwards for a (very) hypothetical solution based on a similar idea to how icon files work (specifically mac OS .icns files)
ICNS files are essentially a package or bundle of multiple image variants designed to suit a multitude of uses - all the way from...
Responsive Summit
So the dust has settled on the first Responsive Summit.
The day was really good - a really positive discussion around a topic that lots of us are figuring out as we go.
Bizarrely the whole thing seemed to get a little blown out of proportion which is a little odd. To clarify, this was not intended as an official event, the outcomes of which were never intended to inform any form of dogma around...
December 2011
1 post
Iamburley's Blog: What's with all the Sharing? →
iamburley:
I have been in Twitter’s company for about a year - a veritable beginner by lots of my colleagues standards. I properly struggled at first. Why tweet? I thought. Who cares what I have to say, about anything? Especially the mundane - but actually time has shown me that is exactly the beauty of…
November 2011
3 posts
Tomayto Tomahto
I Guess it just boils down to Semantics…
How many times has that been the bewildering footnote to an epic duel between two empassioned geeks on the Twitter?
You often hear stuff like that after the realisation dawns three hours and countless 140 character bile nuggets later:
“…we mean kinda the same thing but we’re describing it differently”.
That’s the...
Responsive Design & Breakpoints
There’s an interesting discussion going on at the moment about how using fixed breakpoints to define how a site’s content responds to it’s container is probably not the best way forward in the long term.
It’s true that doing that is still designing canvas in - all we’re really doing is faking more canvases by making up more fixed containers for our content to live...
You can't design a User Experience with a...
I’m not a fan of wireframes. Never have been. And by wireframes I mean flat diagrams of boxes, lines and placeholder elements for UI widgets, forms and media.
There’s very few scenarios I can think of where a wireframe has managed to express the intent of a design i’m working on to a level that’s useful beyond a loose guide to IA and page topography.
Wireframes test...
October 2011
4 posts
Bulletproof Vertical and Horizontal Alignment in...
Had to attack this problem for a recent project. There’s a couple of extraneous wrappers but it works :)
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en” lang=”en”>
<head>
<meta...
The rise of the confused machines
We’re working with CERN at the moment, and on a recent trip over to Geneva we had the opportunity to spend some time with their search department.
While we were chatting we got onto the subject of semantics. They have a lot of very old content spread across the CERN domain, from obscure personal pages put together by staff in a text editor to full blown content managed sites that support...
My favourite SEO response
I responded last night to Andy Clarke’s tweet about people offering SEO services to him with a rather poorly worded version of a response i’ve used a couple times with real SEO consultants to get a measure of how good they really are.
The dialogue usually goes a bit like this.
SEO dude: “Hey! I’m an SEO dude! I can make Google do my bidding for just £10,000/month”
...
The Do Lectures
It’s hard to believe that just three weeks ago I was sat in a tent in South West Wales listening to some of the most inspiring people I’ve ever had to privilege to hear speak, about a number of unrelated topics - but with one common theme.
Every one of those people had made the leap. They’d gone beyond talking, dreaming and thinking and actually made something happen. Some...
September 2011
2 posts
Distorting memories
The mind has a habit of distorting memories beyond the experience we actually had.
One way we counter that is through documenting experiences through photography. A great photo can bring back evocative memories that take you right back to that moment.
The more honest that image is the better you’ll be able to recall the occasion that triggered the desire to capture that moment. The...
Yes, another bloody designers who code post
Who’d have thought it? Once again the discussion has come up about whether designers should code. It’s one of those topics that seems to always be smouldering away somewhere in a dark corner like a charcoal briquette of angst which occasionally gets a new lease of life when a new article gets written and prods it back into a temporary and short-lived flame of interest.
To be brutally honest it’s...
August 2011
3 posts
The bigger problem with the Windows 8 UI
Late yesterday my twitter stream lit up with news of a MSDN blog post revealing the new direction for the Windows 8 Explorer UI. It’s always great to see companies being open about their process and sharing pre-release product. Especially when they take the time to open a discussion around it and (hopefully) taken on any useful or pertinent feedback. Now, it’s become all too easy to berate...
belt and braces
I quite often end up arguing for the addition of breadcrumbs to site layouts i’m working on. Sure they’re not useful all the time but for any site with a categorisation system that introduces nested content (which is pretty much most i tend to work on) then i have this policy.
Its better to have a breadcrumb and not need it, than to need a breadcrumb and not have it.
See what I did...
Check your calendar
When I started making websites back in 1995 the only way to make a “web page” was with a text editor and markup.
I was studying publishing at the time and was more versed in putting together magazine and newspaper layouts using Quark. Not being from a computing background I liked the fact that Quark’s mental model matched pretty well with how you’d go about putting a page...