March 2013
1 post
4 tags
The accessibility of media queries and user choice...
The humble media query has given us a lot of power to help target and tame layout and presentation for different screen sizes. That same power though has introduced a problem in that if you wrap your content in a media query it is very much a one way street.
As responsive web design has gained favour, there have been some brilliant examples of optimising designs for smaller screen sizes, which...
February 2013
1 post
Touchy Subject
The industry trend towards touchscreens gained further momentum today with the release of Google’s Chromebook Pixel.
Despite there being little in the way of tangible benefit to desktop interaction on current UI’s - the onset of touch adoption is an industry initiated (rather than problem solving*) inevitability. Scrambling for points in the innovation race, touch has become the de...
October 2012
1 post
Time for a bit of a change
After a whirlwhind couple of years, the time has come for me to move on from MBD.
I’ve been privileged to work with some of the best designers in the world on some truly incredible projects. But, as much as I love the work, I’ve been doing this stuff for clients for over a decade and a half now and I felt like it was time for a little bit of a change.
Over the last couple of years I’ve been...
September 2012
1 post
Don't hate on the Skeu
Trends come and go on the web and in digital design in general. When one gets overused we get tired and the inevitable backlash follows.
We’ve already seen it happen many times over in our relatively young industry. From bitmap art, to grunge and the faux metal glass and plastic of those hazy crazy aqua web 2.0 days.
Truth is though, the ideas weren’t all bad. It’s all too...
July 2012
1 post
An un-appley apple experience
This weekend my trusty iPhone started getting hot. Really damned hot. So hot, I was concerned it may explode or something.
It was in good shape too; no drops, no spills, no abuse - and it was still in warranty by a good couple of months.
So I duly booked my genius appointment at my local Apple Store in Cardiff, rocked up and explained the situation to the genius dude.
He plugged my poorly...
June 2012
2 posts
UX is simple
If something is unclear - clarify it
If something is arduous - lighten the load
If something is complex - make it simpler
If something is over verbose - strip it back
If something is ambiguous - clarify it
If something is big - make it feel manageable
If people get lost let them find their way out
If something goes wrong - let people recover
If something seems pointless - show the...
The killer feature of iOS6 that just missed the...
Last week Apple debuted iOS6, an evolutionary update to their mobile operating system that typically offered a smattering of refinements dotted amongst a few headline feature updates.
One such headline pricked my ears up more than others, as this particular feature is something i’ve craved since jumping on the iOS wagon back in 2007. It might not sound like much but the “Do not...
April 2012
2 posts
Sometimes
Mobile vs Full vs Responsive. Which wins?
Seems some people think there’s one true way®
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-vs-full-sites.html
http://www.netmagazine.com/opinions/nielsen-wrong-mobile
It would be nice if it was that simple eh?
Thing is - sometimes what’s right for one scenario probably won’t be for another.
And even then, that won’t always be the...
Responsive columns - the odd problem
I’ve been wondering if there’s a smarter way to handle layouts that use odd numbers of columns for responsive sites…
Seems unless you run even column numbers you’ll always end up with orphaned or widowed content as things stack for smaller screens.
Obviously we don’t want to have to force layout constraints if at all possible but it seems like it might be a...
March 2012
6 posts
Upscaling raster/bitmap images for retina
Retina throws up quite a few headaches with regards to scaling raster/bitmapped images so they look decent with no nasty jaggies.
For photos where you have higher resolution source material it’s not an issue but if you need for example to upscale a screenshot which was captured at 72dpi you don’t have many options.
This is where one of our old print tricks come into play.
In...
The simplest way to handle retina graphics for...
Since the new iPad launched, I’ve read numerous complicated methods for handling retina graphics. Most of which have left me scratching my head as to why they haven’t just used media queries. Even Apple seem to have missed the mark a little with some complex js solution that actually pulls two versions of the image in - adding a rather pointless overhead to page load.
So, without...
Mounting NAS share on wake for macbook users
Been putting off doing this for ages but turns out the solution is pretty simple and requires no terminal voodoo.
We had this situation because we’ve switched exclusively to a MacBook Air for our primary home machine so we moved all of our media to a NAS.
The MacBook never gets switched off, just closed and opened as we need it and that was causing the NAS to lose connection and require a...
Why wireframes are dead to me
I posted a rather flippant tweet the other evening as a reaction to yet another frustrating experience with wireframes.
Anyone can draw a wireframe. This is another reason why wireframes have to die.
Now, I can appreciate on it’s own that statement sounds pretty dumb out of context, and as was pointed out, it doesn’t matter how easy is it to wireframe - they are just an artefact...
A Responsive Panacea
The web design industry has a habit of hopping on board bandwagons as they roll by.
And boy do they roll by…
Aligning responsive design with a bandwagon doesn’t really befit the genuine benefit the technique can afford when done right and used in the right circumstances. But let’s get this on the table right off. Responsive isn’t right for every circumstance. It’s...
A Tool talking about Tools
I like tinkering with bikes a lot. Somewhere along the line I even picked up Cytech accreditation so I guess that makes me a qualified cycle mechanic too.
Working on a bike is pretty satisfying if you have the right tools. Sure, you can get by with some improvisation and a bit of ingenuity but if you want to do a great job, you really need the proper kit, or at best you’ll do a shoddy job...
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...
Wireframes are dead. And good riddance too.
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...
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 minute...
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...
