Blogging and all that malarkey

Richard Rutter and I have both co-founded and run design agencies, with over 50 years of combined experience in the creative industries. Our work has taken us on different paths, but we’ve come together to discuss business, clients, creativity, and more, because we both have Unfinished Business.

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.”

What do Yogi Bear cartoons and CSS animations have in common? More than you think. In this video, I show how low-budget animation techniques from Hanna-Barbera cartoons—like background loops, talking heads, and minimal movement—can inspire expressive, lightweight web animations using only CSS and SVG.

Working on a design for composer Mike Worth gave me an idea. What if I created animated title cards inspired by classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons? Thirty-five SVG animations later, Toon Titles Series 1 is complete. These are based on artwork from the first appearance of Yogi Bear in The Huckleberry Hound Show.

It’s fascinating just how many opportunities for animations there are in a static cartoon title card. Here’s another Toon Title, this time based on Prize Fight Fright, a Yogi Bear cartoon from February 1959.

Yours truly guesting in a fun episode of the Boagworld podcast. “Why do so many websites feel like colored-in wireframes? Why personality in design still matters, and how to bring it back.”

Yours truly over at the Smashing Magazine: “Now, you might’ve heard that SMIL is dead. However, it’s alive and well since Google reversed a decision to deprecate the technology almost a decade ago. It remains a terrific choice for designers and developers who want simple, semantic ways to add animations to their designs.”

This time, I put GSAP and SMIL to one side and made a Toon Title using only CSS animations. It’s based on Bewitched Bear, a Yogi Bear cartoon from January 1960. I’ve written a detailed write-up on optimising SVGs for animations which will be published on Smashing Magazine over the next few weeks.

Yours truly over at the Smashing Magazine: “What if you could take your CSS animations beyond simple fades and slides—adding an extra dimension and a bit of old-school animation magic?”

Yours truly over at the Smashing Magazine: “Have you ever thought about how the limitations of early cartoon animations might relate to web design today? From looping backgrounds to minimal frame changes, these retro animation techniques have surprising parallels to modern CSS.”

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.”

The more I dive into using the GSAP library for my Toon Title animations, the more I enjoy it. Here’s another Toon Title, this time based on Space Bear, a Yogi Bear cartoon from February 1960. I learned some new things while making this Toon Title, including how to use GSAP’s timeline feature.

Yours truly over at CSS Tricks: “Designing Mike Worth’s website gave me a chance to blend expressive design with modern development techniques, and revisiting image maps reminded me just how important a tool image maps were during the period Mike loves so much.”

For the past couple of days I’ve been looking at the software and services I pay for as I want to streamline costs where possible and reduce the amount of my money that ends up in the USA.

The more I dive into using the GSAP library for my Toon Title animations, the more I enjoy it. Here’s another Toon Title based on Nowhere Bear, a Yogi Bear cartoon from December 1959.

Here’s another Toon Title based on Bear Face Bear, a Yogi Bear cartoon from September 1959. I’ve been meaning to experiment with GSAP for a while, and this animation gave me the opportunity.

Here’s another Toon Title and one of my favourites from my growing collection of reanimated Yogi Bear titles. This one’s based on Stranger Ranger, a Yogi Bear cartoon from November 1959.

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

I had some spare time today between client work and meetings, so I added another Toon Title to my collection. This one’s based on The Buzzin’ Bear, a Yogi Bear cartoon from December 1958.

Designing for Mike Worth’s new website reminded me how much I love classic cartoons. So, after handing over his design, I carried on exploring CSS, SVG, and SMIL animations. I now have a growing collection of Toon Titles.

I now have a growing collection of Toon Titles. But while making them, I discovered two gotchas, which I haven’t seen documented. One for Firefox, the other for Safari.

Yours truly over at CSS Tricks: “I’ve used border-image regularly. Yet, it remains one of the most underused CSS tools, and I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why. Is it possible that people steer clear of border-image because its syntax is awkward and unintuitive? Perhaps it’s because most explanations don’t solve the type of creative implementation problems that most people need to solve. Most likely, it’s both.”

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?”