For years, I said that one day, when I could, I’d buy the camera that played such a big part in my early career. After 35 years or so, this Sinar P2 5x4” camera is finally mine.

I bought my first mechanical watch back when we were living in Australia for those couple of years. It was a Flieger 47 from the Australian brand Panzera, and it sparked my love of pilot watches.

You know what it’s like. You decide to make a fun little side project. No need to integrate it into your main codebase. It doesn’t have to have compatible CSS or HTML, so no worries. Then you make another one. Same deal. Then another. Oh. All of a sudden, you have several projects, and there are annoying differences between them.

I’m not entirely sure how it happened, but it was yours truly’s 60th last week. I spent it in Germany with Sue and Alex and one of the highlights of the trip was buying a watch to celebrate that big birthday.

If you thought you’d missed my practical layout workshop for designers, well—thanks to COVID—you didn’t.

I’ve brought back my Code ♠︎ Shirts ♠︎ Rock tee designs which bring together, err, code and rock. If you didn’t get Oasis tickets, you’ll definitely, maybe, look like supersonic wearing this outline tee.

“Seasons in the Sun” was weirdly played at a wedding reception I was at last weekend. I don’t think I’ve ever intentionally listened to it, but I remember it being one of those songs my mum warbled along to on long car journeys. It was probably on one of her then husband’s eight-track cartridges along with Billy Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe.

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.

With Christmas and New Year just around the corner, this is my final post of 2024. It’s been an interesting—but certainly not the best—year.

I’ve always thought of myself as coming from Irish roots. I never questioned it. My family are Doyles. Doyles were Irish. So, my roots were in Ireland. Except they’re not.

I don’t check my analytics terribly often, but I did this week, and there was something strange in there: referrals from a domain I didn’t recognise that was using my website’s favicon. Curious, I went to the URL and saw something familiar—my design.

While debating the greatest guitar solos ever with Alex and Sue last week, I suggested that the absolute best is Prince’s one-off live performance of While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Prince played alongside George Harrison’s son Dhani, ELO’s Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, and more. This set me down a rabbit hole to find the best-ever version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

The General Election might be over, but Count Binface hasn’t abandoned us earthlings. Instead, he’s embarking on a comedy tour and this week invaded Sky News’ Politics Hub with Sophy Ridge.

This time last year, I wrapped up my Director of Product Design contract at Nozomi Networks. That was a big change but also an opportunity to evaluate what I’d enjoyed about the role and what I missed from more varied design projects.

From the front cover of the Daily Star newspaper: “ Count Binface launches manifesto promising national service for ex-prime ministers.”

A few weeks ago, BBC Question Time’s Fiona Bruce announced the programme was coming to nearby Chester, so I filled in the online form and applied to be in the audience. I completely forgot about applying until a researcher phoned me the day before the show and asked if I were still available. I was.

I missed the exact date, but a few days ago, my blog turned 20. I’m not up there with Jeffrey or Jeremy, who’ve blogged consistently for even longer—I neglected my blog for periods of time, and posting was often irregular—but still, here we are. It’s twenty years since my first post.

I’m tending and posting to my blog a little more since the recent redesign and as part of that effort, I’ve brought back two very old-fashioned things: A blog roll and an RSS feed.

I don’t remember exactly when—but it was around 20 years ago— Back in 2005, * Rob Weychert turned his (and our) pal Jason Santa Maria into a talking head of Jason’s alter-ego, Virtual Stan. Stan had a backstory, which I don’t fully remember, plus a robot pal called Zorthron.

I don’t know whether it’s been a reaction to post-Musk Twitter from the people I read and talk with on Mastodon, but there seems to be a renewed interest in personal websites and hosting one’s own content.

The spectacle of yet another Tory leadership campaign—this time to replace Boris Johnson—is in full swing. So, I thought it would be fun to rank the hopefuls’ campaign catchphrases. The results may shock you.

We stopped at a motorway services to buy baguettes for lunch yesterday, on our way down through France. I left my wallet behind and I didn’t notice until we were an hour further down the road.

I’m starting my fourth full year working mainly with Nozomi Networks. I love the people there, the work we’re doing is fascinating, and I enjoy the ability to develop designs over a longer period of time. But, I will have some time available for other projects and I want to use that time to make a difference.

I received my Apple MacBook Pro 14" laptop (maxed out with M1 Max silicon, all the cores, and 32Gb RAM) just before Christmas. During the break, I asked on Twitter which apps people had bought most recently and—following those suggestions—here are five menu bar apps I installed on my new Mac.

This year has been a hard one for a lot of people—just like last year, and maybe next year too. To help you make a designer or developer you know smile, I’ve put together my Christmas gift guide 2021.

After rearranging my studio and reorganising my bookcases, I have a few design and development books for sale at bargain prices. They’re all in very good condition and would be a great gift for a new or junior web designer or developer.

On several of the podcasts I listen to regularly, there’s been some discussion about the best speakers for a home office setup. So here’s my take.

I’ve always been fastidious about how my Apple TV movie library looks. When the time came to change the artwork from portrait to landscape, I was disappointed by what Apple provided for my James Bond movie collection. So, I decided to make my own.

When I started travelling regularly to Switzerland for work, I put together my go bag of accessories. What’s in the bag has changed over past few years, so here’s an update on what I’m packing.

I’ve been a paying member of YesCymru for the past year, because I believe that Wales would have a better future as an independent nation. At the very least, people who live in Wales deserve a vote on independence. I have thoughts about the YesCymru message and how they can make a better case for independence.

Sue gets up earlier than I do. Every morning she leaves me in bed, walks down the stairs and towards our kitchen, and opens curtains along the way without thinking. That morning, a beautiful bright blue and green peacock stared back at her through our dining room window.

I bought a four-pack of Apple’s new AirTags, two for me and one each for the family. To make them more useful, I needed ways to attach them to my keys and backpack. I think AirTags themselves are reasonably priced, but Apple’s own-brand accessories definitely aren’t.

For 35 weeks every year—three weeks per month—I work with Nozomi Networks guiding the creative direction and experience design of their cyber security products. The team is growing, so we’re looking for a product designer to join us.

Rooting around in boxes in our storage unit, I came across the Nintendo Game Boy I bought new in 1990. The plastic covering the green LCD was missing, but it was otherwise intact. The box even contained a few game cartridges. I popped it in my pocket and took it home.

Ekster sent me their iPhone 12 MagSafe wallet for review. The short version? I like it. But, I probably wouldn’t buy it.

I’ve been tempted to redesign the Stuff & Nonsense website since we moved back from Australia, but you know, there’s always something else to do.

I love rock music and I also love writing HTML and CSS code, so what better way to bring my two loves together than a set of shirt designs which celebrate both? Code ♠ Shirts ♠ Rock designs are inspired by classic rock band logos. Wear them at home or at work, to a gig, or your next tech conference. They’re ideal gifts for the code loving rocker, or rock loving coder you know. The shop is now open.

To celebrate the launch of my Code ♠ Shirts ♠ Rock tees tomorrow, here are my top five rock albums of all time.

I love rock music and during the 1980s I saw AC/DC on their Back In Black tour, Girlschool, Iron Maiden (before Bruce Dickinson,) Judas Priest, Saxon, Thin Lizzy, and of course Motorhead with their classic line up of Lemmy, Fast Eddie and Philthy Phil. Motorhead were always my favourite, and when my son was old enough to have his own ear drums damaged, we went to see them together.

It always baffled me that with a name like Smashing Magazine, my friends at Smashing hadn’t published a, errr, magazine. Well, now they have.

These days, most of my travel is to my biggest clients in France and Switzerland, but there’s also travel to speak at the occasional conference, and the odd business trip. Every time I travel, I take with me the same set of cables and chargers.

Yes, yes, I know. It’s the week you’re bombarded with discounts on everything from electric toothbrushes to vacuum cleaner bags, but somehow never the things you want. Well, that’s about to change my friends because this weekend only, I’m offering you up to 50 % off my Art Direction for the Web video course on Vimeo.

Maybe, calling my open source web designer and developer contract a “Killer” wasn’t such a smart idea?

“I’ve got an idea,” I said as Sue and I sat on beach outside Perth in Western Australia. “Why don’t we move to Australia for a couple of years? We love it here and it would be an adventure.”

Everyone loved stickers, right? And t-shirts? Right again. And gorillas? Of course you do, especially Errol. Now you can stick Errol stickers on the things you stick stickers on and proudly wear Errol on your chest. (Chest beating optional.)

One of the reasons for my redesigning this website was to make it more appropriate for the work I’ve been making most recently, but also as an opportunity for it to better reflect me as a person. A big part of that was the writing that I did in what I think of as my blogging ‘heyday.’

Starting today, Geek Mental Help Week is a week-long series of articles, blog posts, conversations, podcasts and events across the web about mental health issues, how to help people who suffer, and those who care for us.

It’s been a question that I’ve been asked a lot over the past couple of weeks in the run up to this year’s Geek Mental Help Week, so I thought that I’d explain in more than Twitter’s 140 characters.

Geek Mental Help Week starts next Monday and I’m very happy to say that there are several events happening during the week.

Here’s the skinny. Geek Mental Help Week is happening again during the week of October 3 rd 2016 and I think that it’s going to be the best one yet.

When illustrator Josh Cleland and I were designing our “It’s the taste” home page header, we were of course paying homage to the classic PG Tips TV commercials from the 1970s. In particular, the ad that’s been my favourite, Mr. Shifter. Yesterday, Choppers, the last surviving chimpanzee from that 1971 commercial died.

Sue and I were driving home last Sunday when I realised that on Tuesday this week we would’ve seen Motörhead live at the Manchester Apollo.

Let me start this list of my top five country music albums of 2015 with a confession. Although country’s been by far my most listened to genre again this year, I haven’t listened to it as much as I have the past few years. In the latter part of the year, I’ve taken several musical diversions. The last one’s been Electric Light Orchestra, a band that I’ve loved since my teens. But, with the possible exception of their Wild West Hero, they couldn’t be further from county.

It looks like Geek Mental Help Week 2015 is getting off to a good start with two mental health related events, both happening on Thursday evening.

Last year’s Geek Mental Help Week was, by all accounts, well received and a terrific success. Despite the fact that we pulled it together with sticky tape and string, people told their stories about how mental health issues had affected them and the people who care for them. Those stories were honest and humbling to everyone who read them. I hope that next week, Geek Mental Help Week 2015 can do something similar.

This week at Smashing Conference in New York, I had the very great pleasure of meeting Chris Lilley. I recognised Chris’ name, but it took me a day to remember that he had been the chairman of the ‘Style and Formatting Properties Working Group’ at the W3C, a precursor to the CSS Working Group. Chris is a hugely important person in the history of the web.

It’s amazing to think that John Allsopp’s oft-quoted article, A Dao of Web Design was published fifteen years ago today. A List Apart asked me what John’s article means to me now, but rather than focus on Dao’s flexible design principles, I wanted to talk about a passage that never seems to get a mention.

I care a lot about the things that I use everyday. I need them to be the nicest that I can buy, or at least afford. This means that I care a lot about my computer, phone and the sleeves I keep them safe in. I also care about the pen I write with and most recently about the mug I drink from every day.

Ten years ago, in 2005, my friend Drew MacLellan asked if I would contribute a short article to the then new 24ways, “advent calendar for web geeks” and “a daily dose of web design and development goodness” throughout December.

I know that my taste in country music’s mainstream. Mainstream enough that some country aficionados might criticise my ‘this Englishman’s’ lists for not straying far enough from the top of the country charts. The truth is, I like catchy country pop, and while next year I will try harder to discover music that’s further from the stereotypical southern dirt road, this year I’m happy to listen to songs about beer, cut-off jeans and cowboy boots, fishing in lakes and trucks and tractors.

When I arrived at Beyond Tellerrand in Berlin this week, conference organiser Marc had a nice surprise waiting for me, a new Joli Originals laptop sleeve for my Macbook Pro with Retina Display.

Next week, starting October 27th, is Geek Mental Help Week: A week-long series of articles, blog posts, conversations, podcasts and events across the web about mental health issues, how to help people who suffer, and those who care for us.

I’m researching advertising successes for a new talk that I’m writing and of course that means PG Tips and their famous chimpanzees campaign that ran for 32 years from 1956 and within two years made PG the number one tea brand in Britain and kept them there for decades.

I couldn’t be happier that the brilliant Richard Wiggins and David Hughes, the pair behind Milton Keynes Geek Night, are hosting a special Mental Health evening event as part of Geek Mental Help Week.

I’ve been over the moon with messages of support and offers of help for Geek Mental Help Week. I’m going to write personally to everyone who offered to design and build the website

After talking with Laura on Unfinished Business this week, about burgers in donuts, we moved on to discuss the Geek Mental Help Week that I’ve been thinking about and planning for the last few months. Something that I sincerely hope will help those of us who suffer from mental health issues and the others who support us.

I spent last Friday in Brighton attending the tenth, but my first dConstruct. It was a fabulous conference, in an elegant venue, thoughtfully organised by Clearleft and masterfully presented by Jeremy Keith. Every talk was excellent in different ways and all of them had been brilliantly curated by Jeremy, following, loosely in some cases, the theme of ‘Living With The Network.’ I’m writing a new talk and dConstruct was exactly the inspiration I needed.

Like, I guess, everyone else, I now know more about ALS than I did before the Ice Bucket Challenge. The campaign has been hugely successful, has raised awareness and ten times more money than was raised last year to help combat the disease. Of course charity didn’t start and doesn’t end with the Ice Bucket Challenge and so my friend Paul Boag challenged me, Rachel Andrew and Carl Smith to:

We’re half-way through a project, designing a web ‘application’ for a client. This means writing lots of HTML and making plenty of template pages.

When Sue and I were a young couple with a four year old boy, we didn’t get the chance to go out very much. An evening meal while a babysitter watched our son Alex was a rare treat.

My blog is ten years old today. Of course Stuff and Nonsense as a company is older than that by a few years, but today, ten years ago, on May 13 th *, I rolled out the welcome mat on the new site.

I’d been in Nottingham for the day, catching up with friends including Owen Gregory. Driving home, an idea started to develop. Owen and I worked together on client projects at the time and I trust him to give me an honest opinion, so I pulled the car over, called him and explained the idea. A book called ‘Hardboiled Web Design.’

Jeremy posted links to all the videos from dConstruct 2013. I wasn’t there but I’ve listened to the audio before now. Even so, it’s good to see video of my favourite talk, ‘Don’t Feed The Trolls’ by Nicole Sullivan.

After some welcome time away, I’ve spoken at several conferences recently, notably An Event Apart in Austin, Milton Keynes Geek Night in, err and last week’s Smashing Conference in Oxford. With those events still fresh in mind, I have a few minor moans about lecterns.

Last week I came back from a lovely, if too short, trip to the American South that included me giving a talk in Atlanta. It felt fabulous to be back on An Event Apart’s stage and I’m humbled by every invitation. I gave a new talk, ‘A Modern Designer’s Canvas’ about finding your medium, not becoming intoxicated by your tools or a process and following your own, not someone else’s path. I gave it without a supporting Keynote slide deck.

The first half of the final series of Mad Men is just over a month away and today AMC released a new poster, designed by none other than Milton Glaser.

Some of the most treasured comics in my collection—alongside first prints of Watchmen signed by Alan Moore—are early Dark Horse Presents including the first Sin City stories.

Year Of Code Director Lottie Dexter, talking on Newsnight. (Skip to 5:30. I was going to add my own commentary, but to be honest what Lottie said is funnier without it.)

Loz Gray reflects on his eighteen-months working with the Guardian on their responsive site. There is so much experience here to learn from.

A balanced view on performance versus beauty by proud Welshman Ashley Nolan:

Eclipsed by most of the nonsense going on at the Grammys—Honestly, people actually like Daft Punk?—were two good country music wins.

Last November I switched from a 13" MacBook Air to the equivalent MacBook Pro with a retina display. How does that feel?

It’s once again that time of year when almost every web designer, developer, podcaster and bottle washer that you follow on Twitter is asking you to vote for them in the annual Net Awards. Well, if you can’t beat’em, join’em.

I won’t blame you if you didn’t read it, but a couple of Septembers ago I wrote something personal about my name, how it made me feel, why I changed it and then regretted it ever since. You can read it now if you like, but the general gist is that being called Andrew when I was young reminded me of something I was missing and that made me terribly sad. So I asked everyone to call me Andy instead, and they did that for the next thirty-five years.

Zeldman in fine form: Never fear, web design generalists: many companies and organizations require your services and always will — from universities still seeking webmasters, to startups seeking seasoned folks with multiple areas of understanding to direct and coordinate the activities of younger specialists. But if jack-of-all web work is feeling stale, now may be the time to up your game as a graphic designer, or experience designer, or front end developer. “Diversify or die” is overstating things when the world needs generalists, too. But “follow the path you love” will always be good advice.

Talking with Dan on this week’s Unfinished Business got me thinking about photography and workshops and wanting to learn to make better photographs.

Two weeks before Christmas I took a train to Birmingham to meet a new client. After our meeting I wandered to the Bull Ring and went into the Dr. Martens shop there to buy a new pair of boots.

Related to my This Englishman’s top five country music albums of 2013, Alex sent me a link to this, on YouTube, Grady Smith’s ‘Why Country Music Was Awful in 2013.’

This time last year I didn’t feel much like sharing, so went without a run down of top country music albums of 2012. Looking back now, that was probably a wise choice as the musical year seemed epitomised by Lionel Ritchie, yes ‘that’ Lionel Ritchie’s truly, truly terrible Tuskegee. No link because, ‘Sail On!’

Bob Asbille asked me this week if my Hardboiled Web Design book is worth buying by someone who’s looking to learn about responsive web design.

Talking to Dan Cederholm on Unfinished Business this coming week, our conversation to book writing, in particular working on second, maybe even third editions of books we wrote years ago.

I cannot pass up this opportunity to link to this week’s fabulous Happy Monday interview with Seth Godin.

It seemed apt to post these lyrics today. My person favourite version of this song is on Billy Bragg’s Tooth & Nail album. Listen on Spotify.

I’ve lived with the new video feature in Instagram for about a week and while I was originally sceptical about whether video and Instagram would be a good match, I thought it best to wait a while before forming an expressing an opinion.

And here’s what happened:

People seem to like Rock Hammer, our little “curated project library for Hammer For Mac ” We designed Rock Hammer to help us here at Stuff and Nonsense design faster using HTML and CSS and we use it every day to do just that. Talking about Rock Hammer, some news:

I like to think that at Stuff and Nonsense, our house isn’t so much a place to work as it is a house of fun and although we take the work we do very seriously, we don’t take ourselves too seriously at all. We hope that sense of fun comes across on our site and today we’re putting aside our embarrassment, putting on our baggy trousers and unveiling a new header on our home page.

If you listen to Unfinished Business, you’ll know that I’m a big, big fan of Hammer For Mac, the app its developers say lets you create HTML builds & templates quicker, more efficiently & more conveniently. Hammer works for us because these days we mostly deliver static HTML and CSS templates, instead of static visuals, and we rarely develop complete sites.

In no particular order:

I’d always admired the work of, and the people behind the Web Standards Project. What they had achieved in only a few short years in bringing browser vendors and tool authors together behind open standards was nothing short of magnificent, so when I was asked to join the project on March 31st 2005 it was an ambition fulfilled.

I can remember the first cigarette I ever smoked. It was 1983 and on my way to art foundation one day, I stopped my car at Kettering railway station and bought a packet of ten Benson & Hedges and a box of Swan matches. I pulled on the cellophane band, tore off the top and flipped open the golden box. I’ll never forget the smell of tobacco that rises from a freshly opened pack or the bitter smell of a match. I slipped a cigarette between my lips, struck a match and lit it.

After last week’s episode of Unfinished Business, Laura Kalbag wrote two good posts on mentoring.

Late last year, Anna Debenham and I were talking on the phone. It was one of those easy conversations where we talked about the good and bad of the work we were doing and how to solve a business problem we both had. Before we knew it, an hour had gone by and one of us (I don’t remember who) said, half jokingly, “we should do a podcast about the business side of working on the web.” So we did.

Yesterday, when I appeared on The Web Ahead, I issued this challenge to anyone who complains about hearing familiar faces speak at web conferences:

For the second year running, Cole Henley has compiled the results from his survey of freelancer demographics, rates and working practices in the UK.

After I boasted how nice my site looks in IE10 on a Microsoft Surface tablet (it really does), Grant Hutchinson thought he’d put it through its paces on an Apple Newton MessagePad 2100. Turns out it’s not too shabby.

I spent last week in Geneva. Nothing out of the ordinary about that as I’ve been working there fairly regularly over the last couple of years. But last week was my birthday week — Tuesday. 47. A new wallet. Thanks for asking — so they had to be very special people to persuade me to spend the week with them. They were. Good honest folk.

After I posted my review of Hammer – the simple to use, GUI app that helps me design with HTML – this week, several people tweeted a few alternatives. Oooh, oooh, let’s go look!

Although Adobe have said nothing officially, their silence says it all. Unofficially my little birdies tell me that Fireworks is not being updated for retina displays so the tool I’ve used and loved for a decade or more is effectively dead.

Two great reads this week, on connected subjects:

Two things about the iPad mini as I’ve owned one since Friday:

Speaking of proprietary Apple meta elements, here’s a little gem for labelling a site’s home screen icon on iOS.

You might think — because all the talk at the moment is about seven inch tablets, in particular the iPad mini vs Google’s Nexus 7 vs Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD — that a seven inch tablet was a seven inch tablet was a… Right? Wrong.

I spent a couple of hours this afternoon upgrading this site’s iOS ‘Add to Home Screen’ icons and startup screen images.

A 64Gb first generation iPad sits by my desk. I bought it on the first day they were available in the US and, like many people I suppose, using it has changed what and how I design.

Something strange happened to me on Twitter today.

For about the last five years, my wallet’s been a big Lakeland travel wallet. It was designed to carry a passport and boarding cards, not for everyday use, but I used it everyday. It was big enough to hold all my stuff; credit cards, plenty of cash and the pile of train tickets and receipts that I collect when I’m out and about. When I say it was big, I mean big. I couldn’t mistake when I had it in my pocket and I could easily dig into my bag to find it in my bag without looking. I loved it and was very upset when it was lost.

Here’s something personal I wrote for the Pastry Box Project today:

Some conferences just have ‘that’ special feeling. @media was the first for me in 2005. The An Event Apart in Seattle in 2010 where Ethan Marcotte first talked about responsive design, another. Most recently, the first New Adventures also in 2010.

Adobe announced yesterday that Creative Cloud customers (like me) will receive an upgrade to HiDPI and Retina Display Support. This sounds like great news if you’re a Photoshop or Lightroom user — two apps that will receive the update first — but not if your everyday design app is Fireworks, not Photoshop. There was no mention of when (or more likely if) Fireworks will be upgraded.

It’s been a mad couple of weeks since I came back from holiday. This week onsite with my friends at STV and the first spent head down on another project. But before I could get back to work, I had to set up our new studio.

Making screenshots for the some portfolio panels for my new site design — It’s out on Wednesday kids — I came across a problem. I couldn’t get screenshots sharp enough for a retina display because I’m snapping on a plain ol’ Macbook Air. Damn.

I haven’t posted lyrics for a while, but it seemed appropriate this week, both with the news (no pun intended) this week that Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson face charges relating to phone hacking and the fact that I put the final, final, final touches to my design for the upcoming Hillsborough Independent Panel’s report into the Hillsborough Disaster that will be launched in September.

My beloved Fireworks, now in CS6, encountered an error yesterday and refused to save. My only option was to Force Quit the app and lose half an hour’s work. Hey ho. Then I found out that auto-save might have helped me, maybe lose less work. Here’s what I did.

Remember “MICKY,” the world’s cleverest CHIMPANZEE? Of course you do. Well now, thanks to renowned Liverpool historian Ken Pye, I’ve finally seen a photograph of Micky:

Tweetbot for Mac Alpha is notable for a whole bunch of reasons I won’t get into here. Instead, I found something notable about the CSS the Tapbots team used on the page for their alpha release.

Before she died at the fantastic age of 98, my Nana gave me her boxes of family photographs. She knew I value family histories and would keep her things safe. I’m in the process of organising them and in one box I found a tourism brochure from Liverpool from around 1938/39. In it, an advertisement, for Liverpool Zoological Park caught my interest. In particular, “MICKY,” the world’s cleverest CHIMPANZEE.

More about Micky the world’s cleverest chimpanzee. I’ve ed several parts:

My contribution to The Pastry Box Project this month: There’s no reason why anyone should have to wait more than 24 hours for the money you owe them, especially people you work with. So the next time you receive an invoice from a contractor or supplier, pay it right away. Don’t wait a month, a week, a day or even an hour longer than you have to. Better still, find out how to pay them before they start any work. That way you can pay them immediately when you receive their invoice. They’ll feel good and so will you. (This post was inspired by the experience of someone I know.)

This morning I picked up the phone to (just) Holly, a chirpy sounding lady who asked if we played music ‘within our business.’ If we did, we’d need a license. I told her we didn’t (yeah, shoot first and ask questions later) and she said we’d be removed from their list (whatever that is.)

This post from Jolly Bureau ties in very nicely with what I wrote for The Pastry Box Project this month. So I thought I’d elaborate on: About a year ago, I left day rates and job rates behind and started estimating, billing and working on projects on a weekly basis. A year on and I’m better organised, more productive and less stressed than ever before. Our accounts are in better shape and no one owes us money for longer than a week. It was one of the best business moves I’ve made.

I’ve worked for myself for the last fourteen years and for most of that I’ve worked in my office at home.

Faruk Ate? in Opera Confirms WebKit Prefix Usage:

A lot’s changed since I wrote the original ‘320 and Up’ — my ‘tiny screen first’ responsive web design boilerplate — one year ago.

It’s been almost three years since I launched, what most people thought of as the bat-shit crazy Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS stylesheet.

If you’ve been using Twitter and the Twitter app for iPhone for a while, you’ll probably miss having access to your direct messages in the toolbar since Twitter replaced it with the ‘discover’ button (whatever that does.) Don’t worry, because some friends of mine who work at Twitter in San Francisco showed me a way to unlock a hidden power user mode that puts DMs back in the toolbar.

When I upgraded my phone to an iPhone 4S it instantly took over as my main camera. I use Camera+ and ProHDR, olloclip lens attachments and POPA and I couldn’t be happier with the results I get.

There’s barely a day at home when I don’t have music playing. Either (mostly) through an old (but good) set of Creative Labs speakers I connected to my iMac or (sometimes) through my Sony separates and a pair of fabulous B&W speakers on stands. When I’m on a plane or a train it’s a pair of Klipsch s4i in-ear headphones. But there are plenty of times when I’m traveling and staying in hotel rooms or rented apartments for a week or two at a time when I don’t want to listen through headphones. I don’t mean cranking it up for partying, just a little ambience. The speakers on my Macbook Air are acceptable, but I still carry my whole music collection on a fat old iPod Classic as my library’s bigger than my Air’s hard-drive and I don’t (yet) use iTunes Match. (If I ran rented rooms, I’d make sure that every one came with an iPod/iPhone speaker dock. (Come on hotel owners, they’re not expensive.) That leaves me with using portable external speakers of some sort or another.) For the last couple of years I’ve carried a little X-mini capsule speaker on longer trips. It’s small, light and OK, it’s never going to tick all the volume/quality boxes, but it makes a reasonable sound when my music doesn’t contain a lot of bass. Funnily enough, I’ve noticed that if I plonk the X-mini on a large, flat surface like a table, the sound improves. I’m no audiophile, so I guess it has to do with vibrations or something. That’s why, just before leaving for Australia on this six week trip, staying in rented apartments, I was interested in an offer from mobilefun.co.uk to test a travel speaker designed to use vibrations in just that way — a Pocket Boom Portable Vibration Speaker.

Mantis Stand for iPad and iPad 2 “What have you bought this time?” she asked, handing me the heavy box that the courier had just handed her. I’m sure I looked surprised because, for once, I hadn’t ordered anything.

I’ve just come off stage at An Event Apart San Francisco where I delivered ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’, my talk about CSS3 animations, for the last time. The talk uses a a mad, mad, mad, mad manimation as vehicle to explain CSS3 animations and encourage people to use them (and other emerging CSS properties) for more than for cool, edge case demonstrations. For everyone not at An Event Apart this year, I’ve uploaded my slides on Speaker Deck.

Some quotes from the HP MacBook Pro Envy’s design video (Hat tip to Matt Legend Gemmell ):

I doubt it’ll come as much of a surprise to learn that I love my iPhone 4S. It was a major upgrade from the 3G I swapped my original iPhone for last September, but I’ve been less impressed with its battery life. Now I think I’ve found the culprit. Foursquare

I’ve turned into a country music nut. What a started as downloading Dolly albums for a road trip has turned into real enthusiasm. Although I look terrible in a cowboy hat and don’t know the difference between a’coon dog and a corn dog, lately I’ve listened to little else. We could disagree about what classes as real country — Cough. Taylor Swift — but all I really care about is music I like.

.Net magazine published its The top 25 books for web designers and developers after asking a few contributors and yours truly for our recommendations.

About two years ago, I tweeted “If your CSS is complicated enough to need a compiler or pre-processor, you’re fucking doing it wrong!” I meant it too. After-all, CSS isn’t hard to learn and it’s easy to write and write quickly. So why would you need a processor like LESS or Sass?

After pushing my redesign live yesterday, I’ve been asked a few times about why I pulled respond.js (and with it, CSS3 Media Query support for older versions on Internet Explorer) from the new site.

I gave my first talk of the year at An Event Apart in Seattle. I’m speaking at all six of the events this year (and hosting two workshops ). I called the talk Smoke Gets In Your Eyes after the first episode of Mad Men because I was showing, for the very first time Madmanimation, the Mad Men opening titles recreated using CSS.

Friday night is Geek Ninja Battle Night in Brighton and the topic that Aral “Ken” Balkan, Sarah “Cammy” Parmenter, Remy “Cyclops” Sharp and me (Andy “M(alarkey) Bison” Clarke) are fighting over is Mobile – Web vs. Native! I’m taking the unusual step (for me) of speaking without a slide-deck to back me up, but I’ve prepared an outline for my short talk which might be interesting if you’re not attending.

Compare these.

Since Ethan Marcotte first lit the fire at An Event Apart in Seattle last year and later in that article, we’ve gone crazy about Responsive Web Design. But the more I think about what this means, the more CSS3 Media Queries I write, the more I realise something. I just don’t care about Responsive Web Design. I’ll tell you why.

When we created our Hardboiled Web Design workshops, we wanted to work with partners who give our customers something extra. So we can’t be more pleased to have three amazing partners for our workshops in the UK — Microsoft, VPS.NET and Campaign Monitor.

I got different two scarves last Christmas, from two different people. But the difference wasn’t the colour, or the fabric, it was the giving.

It’s a?????????????????, this web design design lark. Who’d have thought that learning a bit of code would’ve meant I got travel around the world and to places I never thought I’d see?

I’ve always believed that content on the web should be free (from presentation).

My new Macbook Air arrived this evening and it’s the best laptop I’ve ever owned. Less than an hour after unpacking it, it’s already the travelling production powerhouse I wanted.

No it wasn’t a revolutionary new device. It wasn’t even the release of The Beatles music in a lower quality, more expensive format. Oh no, it was much more exciting. Hardboiled Web Design workshop dates in 2011. Yeah! No kidding!

Ahead of an announcement I’ll be making tomorrow (don’t tell anyone, but it’s about Hardboiled Web Design workshops), I decided to make a little fun of myself.

Back in August I started work on a new design for MobiCart, a new mobile e-commerce platform, designing both the front-of-house site and the back-end admin. It was fun, although it lasted only a few weeks.

I’m tired. Really tired. Not just the tiredness that comes from back-to-back transatlantic flights crammed into airline seats (although I have another one of those to look forward to today), but the kind of tiredness that goes deep into my bones.

After a year in the planning and six months in the making, my new book, Hardboiled Web Design is available to buy from Five Simple Steps

Although writing a book might appear to be a lonely occupation, in reality it’s a team effort. For Hardboiled Web Design I’ve been lucky to work some incredible talent, including cover artist, the one and only Kevin Cornell.

A large part of writing a book about website design, markup and CSS is designing and producing the example files that accompany the book. For Hardboiled Web Design, this meant several months of designing, coding, redesigning, recoding and testing.

Writing and producing a book like Hardboiled Web Design provides a fantastic opportunity to work with other, amazing designers, illustrators or a mixture of the two like Elliot Jay Stocks.

This entry has been deprecated: Please use 320 and Up instead. Making layouts responsive using CSS3 Media Queries are a big part of the work that I’m doing for the Hardboiled Web Design site in the run up to the book’s launch.

One of the nicest parts about writing and producing a book like Hardboiled Web Design in partnership with a boutique publisher like Five Simple Steps is having the opportunity to work with other, amazing designers, illustrators and photographers.

After several years of presenting my workshop materials on behalf of other people, on the 1st of September 2008 I announced that I’d be striking out to present my content in my own series of workshop events. I called this aspect of my business For A Beautiful Web.

We just can’t stay off the road. Two years since our last road trip when we drove an RV from Phoenix to Minneapolis, we’re again heading back West and this time we’re Looking for Yogi.

Yesterday, Mike Davidson announced the sweeping redesign of msnbc.com article pages. The redesign is especially brave from a traditional news outlet business perspective as it emphasizes readability and enjoyment over page views. But I do have a minor gripe with its typography and set out to find a solution.

Yesterday Microsoft announced the third Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9. I’ve been using this preview for a while, testing how their newest browser stands up to the examples I’ve designed for Hardboiled Web Design.

In the comments of many web design group interviews, many readers ask for more beards on the panels in particular because, There is no way of discerning how the experience of a bearded designer might differ, simply because there is a complete lack of representation. So, we decided to prepare an article featuring specifically professional bearded designers giving their expert advice.

Important: Contract Killer has been updated.

If you own anything made by Apple, you possibly already know about Hard Graft. I’ve been a huge fan of them, their cases and sleeves since a friend introduced me to them a year or so ago. So when Apple announced the iPad, I knew I wanted a Hard Graft case for it. Hell, I wanted a Hard Graft iPad case even before there was an iPad. And now I have one.

It seems like months ago (it was) when I handed over my design templates for the redesign of CannyBill. Since then, the canny chaps have been working hard to implement the design and @RellyAB has been working her strange magic on their copy. Yesterday the new CannyBill site went live.

Want to learn from the best about jQuery and Designing for Mobile with CSS3? Places are still available on For A Beautiful Web workshops: Designing for Mobile with CSS3 with Dan Rubin and jQuery for Designers with Remy Sharp.

If you are one of those people who love to complain about old browsers, it’s important to remember just how far browsers have come.

Today, RIM unveiled its latest mobile browser. It runs WebKit making every mobile platform except one run that rendering engine. With that in mind, I’d like you to try this experiment.

I’m almost at the end of preparing materials for “Hardboiled Web Design” and soon I’ be writing. To demonstrate various CSS3 properties, I’ve put together an archives page in the demonstration site, “It’s Hardboiled”. That’s where you come in (again).

In other conference news, this time of the online kind, I will be broadcasting from my orbiting space-station for The CSS3 Online Conference, organised by Carsonified on March 22nd.

The conference that got it all started for me as a speaker comes back to London on June 10th and 11th for a sixth year, this time with a new face — Web Directions @media.

Do you occasionally have to explain to a client why the site you made for them using CSS looks different for people who use very old browsing software? You should thank your lucky stars.

A month ago I tweeted about my own frustrations with learning jQuery. If you’re a designer or developer and you feel the same way, I’m over the moon to announce a new For A Beautiful Web workshop: jQuery for Designers with Remy Sharp.

After traveling from the USA for An Event Apart to Australia and Japan for Web Directions in 2009, I had expected 2010 to be quieter. I was wrong. 2010 is going to be busier and more hardboiled than ever.

A week ago I was grumbling ( again ) on Twitter about JavaScript selector engines and enablers for Internet Explorer.

Just out, issue 132 of Computer Arts Projects, including a section on a Decade Of Web Design featuring interviews with Brendan Dawes, Elliot Jay Stocks and me. If you can’t get out today to pick up a copy, here is my interview.

I asked: Web designers are cool, but private detectives are cooler. No argument, but why can’t you be both? The answer? You can.

When the W3C announced that it was retreating from XHTML2 after years in the trenches, propagandists trumpeted that advocacy of XHTML had been foolish. With HTML5 again mired in corporate politics, egotism, squabbles and petty disagreements, it is easy to see why people are questioning if using or advocating HTML5 now is foolish too? At least until all parties reach some kind of armistice.

For A Beautiful Web is starting 2010 with a bang, by bringing Dan Rubin, one of world’s best designers and mobile specialists, to the UK for a full day workshop teaching the key steps to help you transform your site for mobile users.

I’m in the middle of preparing materials for a new book, “Hardboiled Web Design”. To demonstrate CSS3 selectors, transforms and transitions I’m putting together a page in the demonstration site, “It’s Hardboiled”. That’s where you come in.

Always an example of the best the web design industry has to offer, this year 24 ways, the advent calendar for web geeks, has its focus firmly set on moving your web design forward.

(On 24th December 2009, the site that this letter refers to was replaced.)

Writing this week about eating accessibility humble pie and using CSS attribute substring selectors, a comment by clever Craig Cook sent my imagination reeling.

A simple game time waster (and an old school blog meme). Go to the address bar in your browser and type a letter. Start with “a”, end with “z”. Here is what I found.

We all make mistakes. Right? Particularly when it comes to accessibility. Often in the rush to ready a site for launch, we forget to check the details that can make a world of difference. That’s what I did when I launched the latest For A Beautiful Web.

Changingman, a liquid three column CSS layout with a fixed positioned and width centre column, released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license. (This entry was originally posted on 23rd November 2005 and has been updated in 2009.)

Some things are best expressed without words.

Ambling around a five storey bookstore in the Jinbocho area of Tokyo today, in the computer section I stumbled across a Japanese translation of my Transcending CSS and CSS Best Practice by Miki Ofuji.

First a disclaimer. I smoke cigarettes. I know that they are bad for me will probably kill me early or make me ill, but I for now at least I choose to smoke because I like something they give me physiologically.

Tomorrow I leave for Japan, taking For A Beautiful Web ‘s Advanced CSS Styling workshop to Tokyo and then presenting an edited version of Walls Come Tumbling Down at Web Directions East 2009.

Relly Annett-Baker on first draft copy for CannyBill

Now that our For A Beautiful Web workshops calendar is closed for the year, it was time to push live a redesign of that site with a focus on my new DVDs. This was a chance for me to play, both with HTML5 and CSS transforms and transitions to spice up the interface.

Web forms often ask visitors for non-essential information, but long and complicated forms can hinder a sales or sign-up process. Wouldn’t it be cool to give users the option to hide these optional fields at their own discretion. (This entry was originally posted in 2004 and has been updated in 2009.)

If you’ve been looking to buy any (or all) of my three new For A Beautiful Web DVDs (Designing With CSS, Designing Web Accessibility and Designing With Microformats) from Amazon.co.uk, you’ll have noticed that they are not listed. Here’s why.

Before we send over our design files to the chaps at CannyBill, first a run through of the browsers that we have tested in the new design and some musings about what browser testing actually means today, in the face of an ever more diversified browser and device landscape.

With the first phase of the CannyBill redesign process drawing to a close, I would like to say a huge thank-you to the CannyBill team for encouraging a public, open design process and to everyone who has commented and tweeted their helpful suggestions.

When is it the right thing to do not to attempt to reinvent a well established, tried and tested design pattern or convention. This question has come up while I have been designing the CannyBill prices and plans page.

A fascinating look at Relly Annett-Baker ‘s process of writing copy for CannyBill and finding its voice.

It’s not everyday that I get to work with a client that completely gets why it’s important to push the progressive enrichment boundaries by using HTML5 and the kind of advanced CSS styling that I teach at my workshops. Luckily, the CannyBill team do more than get it. I’d like to share a little of the HTML5 and CSS that I’m using for this project.

Relly Annett-Baker guests on And All That Malarkey.

Liked most of my projects these days, I’m designing the next iteration of front of house site in a browser rather than making static visuals of page layouts. I know I’m in danger of sounding like a broken record, but I genuinely do find the process to be faster and better at scoping ideas and demonstrating them to clients. So I thought I’d share the start of this process and the files that I use.

After two weeks on the CannyBill redesign project (one of which I spent traveling to Chicago for An Event Apart ), it time for deep breaths as I talk about my design of the home page for the new CannyBill front of house site and ask for your thoughts and suggestions.

I have to confess that when I’m designing, I often don’t take too much notice of a company’s peers or competitors.

While open to the public redesign projects have lately been popularised by Mark Boulton Design ‘s work for Drupal and by Happy Cog ‘s work for Mozilla, it’s rare to find a commercial company involved in an open project.

Ooops! The Stuff and Nonsense Theatre Company have printed 20,000 flyers with my URL on them by mistake.

Last Friday I recorded a video interview with Ryan Taylor. In it I talk about my first job (making My Little Ponies), web design and conference speaking.

I’m busy working on the slide deck and example site files for our Advanced CSS Styling workshops in Birmingham, Newcastle (and Tokyo). I’m really excited about this new workshop format and wanted to share one of the example site pages.

Today I’m reviewing the final edit of my Designing With CSS DVD. I couldn’t resist sharing the end credits and gag reel.

The Carsonified roadies have loaded their white Transit and braved the ferry across the sea to Northern Ireland. This week I’m joining the Future Of Web Design Tour in Belfast, presenting “How to Design in the Browser”. More on that later. But first, a one-hour workshop, “Extreme Makeover, Typography Edition”

It’s here — months in the planning and weeks in the making — the new Stuff and Nonsense. The new design is a continuation of my efforts to blend professional and personal styles into a brand that is as much about my personality and interests as it is about our work.

What can I say? How chuffed am I? Chuffed to little mint balls, that’s how much. Why? Because I am excited to announce that everyone who registers for a For A Beautiful Web master-class will receive a one-year Typekit Portfolio subscription, courtesy of our friends at Small Batch.

I’m back from two-weeks hard-earned holiday in the south of France. What have I missed? Over five-hundred unread RSS posts for starters. I’m not usually one for best of entries, but here, in no particular order, are some things that have caught my attention — too many for a deluge of elsewhere entries.

It’s a secret I need keep no longer — we’re taking For A Beautiful Web to Japan in partnership with our friends at Web Directions.

Typotheque is an independent type foundry based in the Netherlands who offer fonts for PC and Macintosh. They have kindly invited me into the beta program of their new @font-face embedding service.

If you’re planning to attend, or thinking about attending, one of our Advanced CSS Styling workshops in either Birmingham on September 25th 2009 or Newcastle Upon Tyne on October 30th 2009, here is the schedule for the event workshop to whet your appetite.

With all the buzz around @font-face delivery services such as Typekit, one question remains to be properly answered. How can web designers show concept work to their clients when the fonts they want to use are hosted (and protected)?

I’ve been slowly evolving the design of For A Beautiful Web over the last few months since I relaunched it in April. Back then I stripped it back from its almost universally unpopular first design, then added hints of a future direction on the home page. Now that design has matured and today I launched its sister site at Transcending CSS.

We had such a great time presenting our master-classes in London last year and in Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney, we decided to host more. ‘Advanced CSS Styling’ will be a one-day workshop in Birmingham on September 25th 2009 and Newcastle Upon Tyne on October 30th 2009. Ten early-bird tickets are available per event at only £275.00+VAT per person, but get in quick, these are sure to be snapped up quickly.

This morning my inbox popped with an invitation to the preview of Typekit, a technology platform that hosts both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM. Back in May I wrote that Typekit will change everything, here are my first impressions of Typekit in action at For A Beautiful Web.

Joe Drew, one of the people on Mozilla’s graphics team has responded to my comment on First Impressions on Typekit; Studying type rendering closely also calls into question the natural differences between the ways that browsers render type as I discussed in Walls Come Tumbling Down. Safari’s text rendering is clearly more refined and superior to Firefox 3.5.

It’s been one helluva busy, tiring but inspiring week, traveling first to speak at An Event Apart Boston, then, with Jeremy Keith and Jason Santa Maria onto London for @media2009. At both events, I presented Walls Come Tumbling Down. Here are the presentation slides and transcript.

It’s been ten days since I uploaded the last batch of New Internationalist design files. Since then the team at New Internationalist have had time to live with the templates and make a small number of suggestions and requests that I have implemented over the last couple of days.

Smashing Magazine published an excellent primer for CSS3 properties by Inayaili de Leon today which referenced a little of my work. I was pleased, but as today as gone on and I’ve watched the comments roll, my heart started to sink.

As true now as it was in 1986.

While the folks at New Riders work hard on editing the three DVDs that I recorded in February, and I make trouble by asking for tiny changes, I turned my attention to designing the cover artwork.

Could this be the day that I eat my words about CSS frameworks? I’ve been mean to them in the past, written harsh things. I once likened them to instant cake mixes in response to Jeff Croft’s What’s not to love about CSS frameworks?

Last Monday, I met up with the New Internationalist team to talk about what we had accomplished so far in the redesign and the remaining issues. As he was in the area, we were also joined by my friend and design meeting interloper Dan Rubin.

I wanted to learn more about CSS attribute selectors. —This article was originally published on And All That Malarkey on February 20th, 2005.

Now is the time, particularly during this open design process, where I get nervous about presenting the design I hope to launch. While I know that there are still aspects left to resolve, I wanted to share my process and thinking behind what I’m showing today.

For the last few days I’ve been working on the branding aspects of my New Internationalist redesign and I have to admit that I’m struggling. There is a raging argument going on in my head. Please help me make it stop.

As I’m putting together Walls Come Tumbling Down, the talk that I am giving this year at @media 2009 London and An Event Apart, I wanted to share some of my notes on how the current recession will affect the way that web designers and developers work.

Well, perhaps not quite everything. Today Jeffrey Veen let the cat out of the proverbial. He announced Typekit.

It’s possible that this should be an elsewhere entry, but as so many people have emailed, tweeted and otherwise asked about the placeholder images that I’m using in my New Internationalist redesign process, I thought I’d share the source.

Thanks to all of the excellent and constructive feedback so far, I am today working towards the New Internationalist pages that I am designing being feature complete and ready for sign-off next week. With that in mind, I wanted to share with you a top-down view of all of the pages that I have been working on.

Today I want to share and invite your feedback on my work on the New Internationalist blog pages.

Today I want to share and invite your feedback on my work on the New Internationalist magazine pages.

I hope that New Internationalist readers will never see 404 Page Not Found.

Most often when I’m designing a new site, I focus first on its content pages. Then, working from the inside-out, I finally arrive at the home page. This is the approach that I’ve taken in my work for New Internationalist. That said, a site’s home page is often what people want to see first, so who am I to disagree? Today I want to share and invite your feedback on my work on the New Internationalist home page.

How do you answer the Internet Explorer 6 question?

When I was asked by New Internationalist to design for their online magazine, blogs and shops, the challenge seemed pretty daunting. The New Internationalist site has content that reaches back over thirty years, more page templates than you can shake a riot policeman’s truncheon at and a structure that involves some complex interaction design challenges. I also have limited time, budget and resources available.

As part of the New Internationalist redesign project, I’m focussing on how the organization presents itself online. To begin that process, I’ve been researching the printed magazine since it started in 1973. (I should stress that I’m not working on the organization’s overall branding, nor the design of the magazine.)

A few weeks ago I received an email from New Internationalist magazine asking me if I’d like to work on the redesign of their online magazine, blogs and shop. I was away from my studio when the email arrived so I pecked out a quick reply on my iPhone. I think it went something like New Internationalist? Oh fuck yes!

Yesterday I took a call (and received an email) from a long-standing client. I designed for them in 2001/2. Over the last year, the staff responsible for updating their site had changed, they had mislaid their passwords and they needed help. So help was what they got.

Earlier this week, I wrote about the limitations of current CSS to bind font styling to the availability of typefaces. I mused that a clever person might develop a solution using Javascript.

The baseline is an invisible line onto which all type characters sit, although of course some characters (including ‘j’, ‘p’, ‘g’ and ‘y’) have descenders that hang below the baseline. Baseline shift involves moving characters up or down in relation to the baseline and using it effectively can make a huge difference to the professional look of your type. Although baseline shift has traditionally been a part of using tools like InDesign or Quark, there are ways to accomplish the same results using today’s CSS.

As I wrote yesterday, CSS has unresolved problems concerning the lack of variable line-heights (leading) in relation to available installed typefaces. I don’t expect those to be resolved any time soon, unless by switching to @font-face for even commonly installed typefaces or some clever JavaScript font detection. During my teaching in Australia last week, another leading issue, in relation to CSS frameworks, came to mind. This one can be resolved by applying a little typography knowledge.

Would you be surprised if you heard me grumble about CSS3 and web typography *?

A little over a week ago, but what seems like much, much, longer, my wife and I made the long trip from home to Australia to host three Visual Web Design Masterclasses in partnership with our good friends at Web Directions. It proved to be quite a week.

It’s always a pleasure to have the opportunity to build on work that I have done in the past, so a few weeks ago I jumped at the chance to work on a small visual design realign for my friend Richard Rubin of Really Worried fame.

I've got a Honda CRV. It's eleven years old. It's rusty around the bonnet, the electric windows are sticky and the exhaust is noisy. That's OK. It's been reliable, hardly serviced and as I only drive it a few miles about twice a week, it does everything that I need it to do. I'll probably drive it until I can't drive it anymore.

You might have noticed already, things are looking a little different around here. Over the Easter weekend, I took some time away from the pressing matter of eating chocolate to work on a redesign, specifically to address (justifiable) concerns over the previous design’s readability but also to prepare bringing For A Beautiful Web visually in line with a coming redesign of the Transcending CSS book site.

If you follow me on Twitter, you might know that I've spent the last couple of weeks in San Francisco, recording several DVD titles for New Riders. Most will be available in around three months, but I'm pleased to announce that one, I Can Make You A CSS Zen Master, is available today. Watch the trailer below to find out more.

The Internet Explorer team today posted details that IE8’s Compatibility Mode (replicating IE7) will not render sites exactly as IE7 does.

In just a few short weeks, in the middle of April, I’ll be squeezing myself into an airline seat and flying the 9500 miles from home to Australia. This will be the third time that I’ve made the trip in four years, the last two times to speak in Sydney at Web Directions.

A couple of weeks ago, Ryan Taylor interviewed me for the Boag World bodcast on the subject of Internet Explorer 8 and the state of CSS in browsers generally.

This week Brian Suda and I launched tweetCC, a Twitter micro-app that allows Twitter users to declare a Creative Commons license for their tweeted content. I’ll be writing more about why we decided to make tweetCC and why licensing you tweets is important in a future entry, but as several people have commented on my design and CSS implementation, first a few words about them.

I’m sorry for posting twice on the same day about tweetCC, but it’s not everyday that something that I have worked on and feel super passionate about is picked up by, and hits the homepage of Wired.

I’m currently spending my time writing and preparing content for a new DVD title, Designing Accessibility (For A Beautiful Web), part of a series of DVDs that I am making for New Riders, that will be published sometime in 2009.

Today it came to light in a blog post on Microsoft’s IE Blog that the company intends to include a new ‘compatibility feature’ and black/white list that it hopes will help users if sites break in the up-and-coming release of Internet Explorer 8.

As the title suggests, we’re spreading our wings and taking our For A Beautiful Web Visual Web Design Masterclass to Australia this April, with dates in Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney.

Running a small business means that I divide my time between the things that I love doing (project planning, designing and dealing with people) and the things that I don’t enjoy so much (business planning, accounting and dealing with (some) people).

Last year, Leslie Jensen-Inman was working on her graduate thesis and interviewed a cast of shady characters including Andy Budd, (Gentleman) Jon Hicks, Jeremy Keith and yours truly on the subject of web design and development education.

At the moment I’m writing a script for a DVD tutorial on microformats that I will be recording for New Riders at the end of February. While designing some shiny new examples for the hCalendar event microformat, I’ve been revisiting the problems and discussions of accessibility that surround the date design pattern and thinking about possible design solutions.

Nothing drives me crazy like TV ads for insurance comparison web sites (if I hear once more that you don’t have to be a computer wizard to use confused.com, I might just drive over the edge).

Let’s be fair, few customers are professional writers and few hire one when making a web site. That is why I now include professional copywriting into every estimate as a non-removable item. When customers are adding their own copy to a site, I give them ten simple tips to follow.

The United States’ soon to President Barack Obama’s choice of Tobias Frere-Jones’ Gotham typeface has been well documented.

Important: Contract Killer has been updated. 24ways goes from strength to strength each year and I was so pleased when Drew McLellan asked me back to contribute again.

Stuff and Nonsense is ten years old today.

Judging from the response from the people who attended, our first Visual Web Design Masterclass in London this month was a huge success. As a large part of the day was spent learning about typography, both relating to type and to layouts devised from typographic principles, I chose to illustrate the lessons by typesetting The Waste Land, a poem by TS. Eliot. If you weren't able to attend, now is your chance to take a look at the results of my experiments.

One of the questions that I get asked quite frequently is until CSS3 moves forward, is there anything new we can say, or write, about CSS?. That's a good question. Not as good perhaps as Why does Gordon Brown do that funny thing with his mouth? or Would Eddie Izzard make a good Doctor Who?, but quite a good question none-the-less.

What would you do if with only minutes until your guests arrive for your first workshop event, your venue suddenly becomes unavailable? Would you panic?

With only a week to go until our first Visual Web Design Master Class in London, I’ve been taking time away from client work to focus on writing all new content that I hope people attending will really love.

Enrique Ramírez wrote to me yesterday with a few questions about Microformats and markup. I’ve been asked these questions before, a few times. So rather than send Enrique my answers on a postcard, I’m replying in public, with Enrique’s permission of course.

As I check off the days on my calendar, there are only two full weeks until our Visual Web Design Master Class in London on December 1st and only a handful of places still available.

It seems like a lifetime ago that I first sat down with a cup of tea and a bourbon biscuit and thought about the conventions that we use for naming HTML/XHTML id and class attribute values.

I promise. In the run up to the opening of the Watchmen movie next year, I will resist the urge to write about or link to every piece of Watchmen trivia.

Well not exactly. Herr Marx has been dead for 125 years, and anyway, I hear that he was often too poor to buy a round. Still, we think that we're showing solidarity to hold our Visual Web Design Master Class evening social in the beardy geezer's local boozer.

Who said that you can’t teach an old rocker new tricks? At An Event Apart Chicago, it was Dan Cederholm ‘s latest talk example, Color Transparency With RGBa that made me sit up and take notes.

In what I hope will not be a series about the stupid things that clients complain about.

If you attended An Event Apart in either Chicago or New Orleans, or @media in London this year, you might have seen Underpants Over My Trousers, my talk about how comic book design conventions and principles can influence web page design.

I was lucky to be sent a preview copy of Rachel Andrew ‘s soon-to-be-published book Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong!, published by those nice chaps at SitePoint. I’ll be writing a full review later this week, but as the book is largely (almost exclusively) devoted to CSS display: table; properties, I couldn’t wait to try out some of the techniques she advocates.

It's lovely to come home and find something nice waiting for you, isn't it? A nice cup of freshly brewed tea is lovely (nicer with biscuits, but not so common). So is a nice piece of ginger cake with lemon icing. A smiley lady is nice too. I got all three today (which was lovely), but what made it lovelier was a copy of Jon Burgerman's retrospective book of his illustrations, Pens Are My Friends.

I am really, really pleased that places on our Visual Web Design Master Class are selling fast. Book your place before 10th October 2008 and you could win a copy of Inspired Design (DVD) and Transcending CSS (book), together worth £68.00*.

Web designs need not look exactly the same in all browsers. I know that’s a topic I have written about and spoken on a fair amount before, but somehow I’m always amazed by the reactions that I get when the subject comes up.

Demonstrating our designs to clients as XHTML/CSS pages rather than as static Photoshop or Fireworks has streamlined our workflow and helped us to set and manage a client’s expectations better than ever before.

Having spoken at almost twenty major conferences in the last few years, I've picked up a fair selection of schwag items and giveaways. Now that we are busy organizing our first For A Beautiful Web events, I'd love to know what the best shwag items you've received are.

Back in April, I was booked by Carsonified to present a half-day workshop on Microformats as part of their Future Of Web Design London spectacular. So what have Microformats got to do with death rays?

Want an easier way to re-style and optimize your pages to work better in Safari Touch (or Mobile Safari if you prefer) on the iPhone or iPod Touch? I did and now with a custom version of Allan Jardine ‘s Conditional-CSS I have it. And you do too.

When I set out to design the site to launch For A Beautiful Web I knew that I wanted to set a new tone and arrive at something a little unexpected. One of the ways that (I hope) I have achieved that level of unexpectedness was to turn to a classically trained artist, rather than a web designer for creative direction.

Having been booked by Carsonified to host a full-day workshop on advanced CSS back in May, in the weeks leading up to the show I had a flash of inspiration. Why not combine one of my favourite topics with one of my favourite musicians?

It's been on my mind for a while. In the last few years I've been one of the luckiest web designers on this planet (and probably others) because I've been asked to travel all over the world to talk about web design, CSS and even comic books. I love every minute of it.

Peachpit Web Design Reference have published the first in a series of my articles on Microformats, Microformats: The Fine Art of Markup. In this series instead of focussing on the technical aspects that so many people have done far better, I will be combining talk of Microformats with the wider issue of the importance of writing meaningful mark-up. I’ll be finishing up each of the subsequent articles with what are hope are cool new ways to style Microformat rich mark-up using CSS.

My entry of last week, where I called for the current W3C CSS Working Group to be immediately disbanded, has generated some serious debate, and a few raised voices. I’m glad that is happening. Now, after a little more consideration, I thought I would outline some concrete proposals for how the CSS Working Group could change for the better.

Following Opera’s action, today I am calling on Bert Bos, chairman of the CSS Working Group, and those higher up within the W3C including Sir Tim Berners Lee, to immediately disband the CSS Working Group in its current form. I am asking for immediate action to be taken on the formulation of a replacement CSS Working Group that will include new members who are not the representatives of browser vendors.

Some of you might know that I’ve been passionate about learning to ride large motorcycles for a while and have been taking a DAS course at Pro Bike. While I’ve not yet managed to pass my test (that’s another story), I am determined and today more inspired than ever by an email from my friend Pascal who has just completed a ride from southern France to Beijing and back.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been bombarded (in e-mail, in person, and over IM) with questions about instant cake mixes. It’s completely understandable people would come to me with these questions.

Tomorrow will see me making the long journey south to Sydney, Australia to speak at what will be my third Web Directions conference. Although the prospect of so many hours confined to an aircraft seat is again a little daunting, I’m looking forward to what (if previous years are anything to go by) will be an amazing event.

If your Internet connection happens to lose a bit of CSS data, you get a mess on your screen.

This is the all new Stuff and Nonsense web site. Things have changed a great deal around here since the last time you may have stopped by. This site is a merger of two domains, the Stuff and Nonsense company portfolio plus the archives from And All That Malarkey.

To my complete and utter amazement, Jon Burgerman has agreed to create something truly, but unsurprisingly unique for this site. In doing so he has made me realise just how different a feel a new illustration can create, even when nothing else on a page changes.

My long, lost brother Mikey sent me an email today with a link to a video made by his company, ADP. I just had to share it. Watching the ADP video made me wonder if, in the light of our recent public relations problems, should the Britpack make a video?

I had looked forward to it for a year and it certainly didn’t disappoint. For me, this year’s SXSW Interactive was the best so far. Every year seems to be a little different.

This morning when I opened my inbox, I found a flurry of messages discussing the Britpack and what it is, could and shouldn’t be and about whether or not the wider perception of it was elitist and somehow harmful.

The end of this week sees web design masterminds, mobsters and even petty criminals heading to Austin for SXSW. It’s like Parkhurst for design geeks.

I haven’t watched television on a regular basis for a year now, preferring instead to watch TV series on DVD on my Mac at the end of the day. Over recent months I’ve been going to bed with Jack Bauer, watching 24 from seasons one to four.

I joined Amazon’s DVD Rental service recently, which so far has turned out to be (not unexpectedly) brilliant. I’ve been filling up my rental list with half-forgotten classics as well as the occassional bustblocker and along the way have developed a penchant…

I am the one, orgasmatron, the outstretched grasping hand My image is of agony, my servants rape the land Obsequious and arrogant, clandestine and vain Two thousand years of misery, of torture in my name Hypocrisy made paramount, paranoia the law My name is…

So Web Directions North has wrapped and tomorrow we head to the mountains for a spot of cold weather sports activity (or probably in my case, my lips around a nice hot chocolate). But first, other news.

Packed: Passport, toothbrush, Mac, pants, socks, toasted sandwich maker iPod. I think I’m ready: Web Directions North here I come. I’m heading out on Sunday.

I have been meaning to establish a new backup regime at Stuff for months. But unlike some of the other things I’ve been doing, sorting out backup isn’t sexy, isn’t exciting: so it lay whimpering for attention on my to-do list.

Plastered all around the walls on London Underground are Apple ads for Apple ads. Specifically ads for the new UK versions of Apple’s I’m a Mac, I’m a PC ads.

I had thought that months of solid writing Transcending CSS would have left my ink a little dried out. But an offer to write a series of articles for Informit on Creating Inspired Design was one that was too good to pass up.

Over on Digital Web, Carolyn Wood asked Colly, Andy Clarke said recently that what always impressed him about sites designed by you is that you don’t limit yourself to the normal CSS layout conventions.

So I’m sat infront of my Mac yesterday and at about 4.30, the phone rang. Now I’ve written before about telephone salesmen, but this was a call with a difference. Caller: Hi, my name is Roger Daltrey from Who’s Better Software.

I’m always inspired by Veerle’s Adobe Illustrator tutorials. But Illustrator is a tool that I’ve never really used beyond its rudementary features and I’m inspired to learn more.

Coming back to a site made a while ago, it can be common to scratch your head and wonder how (and why) you made certain decisions. Coming back to a site that you made six years ago can be enough to make you break down and sob like a little girl.

Despite owning several iPods including a 60Gb that contains my entire music collection, all six Star Wars movies and a multitude of other files, the new iPod Shuffle is such a thing of beauty that I just had to have one.

This morning I returned from a (literally) flying visit to New York where I had the very real pleasure of visiting my friends at AOL and speaking at their Design and Programming Offsite event.

It’s been a while since I wrote about CSS on And All That Malarkey, ( Ed says: It’s been a while since you wrote about anything here Malarkey!.) I’ve been busy documenting some of my working methods and thought that I would share Stuff and Nonsense’s current…

Last week I came back from a (semi) working trip to New York. As it’s been nine years since I was last in the city, I did all the usual tourist attractions (Empire State Building, Circle Line cruise, Central Park) and I ate hot-dogs and donuts and bagels and…

With Web Directions South and Fundamentos Web now both done and dusted, I have only one public event left before the end of this year. You might think that attending conferences regularly would mean that I have heard what is on offer from speakers.

Drawn has a cute story about Picasso charging for his work. It helped me remember a story that an old photographer friend once told me. A printing company calls in an engineer because their press is printing out of register.

Following much of the discussion over the future, activities and progress of the W3C over recent weeks, Mozilla’s David Baron, a member of the W3C’s CSS Working Group has published a long and detailed examination of what he believes are the conflicting…

As Eric was saying earlier, I too am more concerned about the prospect of trusting my trusty Mac to a cargo hold than I am about having my plane blown from the sky (if you believe any of that stuff anyway).

The end of this next month should see me taking the longest flight of my life; from London to Sydney for Web Directions, then on to Spain for Fundamentos Web. Two conferences, a world apart.

As I’ve just been invited to speak at a web conference in Canada next year, I thought that it was about time that I updated my biography. Looking back at what I have written before, it all seemed a little bland; designer this, accessibility that.

the CSS Working Group is finally aware that it must include at least one classically trained artist and graphic designer on the team.

I invited thirty celebrity CSS chefs to collaborate in baking a single stylesheet. Now the bell has rung, the oven mitts are at the ready and our Too Many Cooks (Dvorak special) is ready to come out of the oven. But first, an open letter to Mr. Dvorak.

After his altogether brilliant article Why CSS Bugs Me, I’m officially designating this week to be John C. Dvorak week. To help Mr.

Bert Bos man Bos has informed me that those boffins (Ed says Oxford English Dictionary: Brit, colloq, a person engaged in scientific research ) at the W3C are offering places at a W3C Webinar on Mobile Web Design.

Early one mornin’ while makin’ the rounds I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down I went right home and I went to bed I stuck that lovin’.44 beneath my head Got up next mornin’ and I grabbed that gun Took a shot of cocaine and away I run Made a good…

40 years of hope, 120 minutes and 2 geeks biting their nails in Brown’s in Hockley, Nottingham

Hicks’ (justifiable) excitement about his logo design article appearing in.net magazine (#152 August) has brought back memories for Malarkey.

Even after only the briefest of spells travelling in the USA this year, I became accustomed to those creature comforts that make a travelling designer’s life so much easier.

These last few days I’ve been looking back on @media2006; 800 people, two amazing days and one designer left feeling very humbled by the whole experience.

Driving around Engerlaaand, it’s hard to miss the flags of Saint George flying from buildings and cars. Every second person is sporting a replica shirt and petrol stations are doing a roaring trade in everything from Ferdinand fragrance air-fresheners to…

I’m not a user of many web 2.0 applications, although the few that I have bonded with, including Basecamp, Blinksale, Flickr and Ma.gnolia, I use pretty extensively.

A dissertation evaluating the awareness of web accessibility amongst UK small businesses. Student Andy Higgs has written an excellent dissertation on ‘ Web Accessibility In UK Small Businesses ’.

I would like to thank everyone who organised and attended IceWeb 2006. It has been a privilege to have been asked to present my two sessions, How To Be A Web Design Superhero and Feeding your Creativity without Compromising User Needs.

With everything else that has been going on lately, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything much about CSS. It’s not that I’m any less interested in CSS; infact s e ven’s recent Beta has me more excited than ever about what we will be able to do on a…

It’s time to tell the remaining untold stories from Arno Zimmerman. Unfortunately not all of Arno’s attempts at domain name acquisition were successful, but thanks to everyone concerned for being great fun to play with.

In today’s Arno Zimmerman episode, Paul Scrivens hones in on the money in’The Nine Rules’. Of all Arno’s contacts, Paul was the only person to name a figure. Arno would have been pleased to pay it too, if only life were so simple.

My good friend Arno Zimmerman has been busy this Easter weekend, attempting to procure domain names for his nefarious purposes clients. In today’s episode, Jeremy Keith smells a rat (rather than the sweet smell of money) in Adactio Pour Domme.

Being the proud owner of a new PowerMac Book ProMac Book BookPro Mac MacBook Pro with its dinky Apple Remote, I wondered what fun or naughtiness could be had with this (where the hell does the battery go) IR doofer.

April 27th and 28th will see me wrapping up warm, as I’m heading to Iceland for IceWeb 2006; billed as Iceland’s premier web oriented conference.

I often feel blue wishing I was old enough to have seen the blues greats play. Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson II, T. Bone Walker and BB King are rarely far away from iTunes for more than a few days.

Today I opened my email to find a passionate plea for help from a web designer looking to find good books or articles on web design.

Recent conversations over at 456 Berea Street on the subject of whether a new solution for clearing floats without structural markup is needed, required an answer. So at MIX06 I sat down with s e ven’s developers to find a recommended answer to the question.

Somehow, in Malarkey world conversations often take an unexpected turn down memory lane. Yesterday I was trying to explain to (a slightly bewildered) person about one of my favourite animated cartoon classics, Mr. Benn.

With blue suede shoes on his feet and Viva Las Vegas ringing in his ears, Malarkey can’t help falling in love with Vegas as he reports from Microsoft’s MIX06 conference.

SXSWi, The Web Standards Project is changing, entering a new time in its history, opening the hive up to better include the communities and issues we’ve done our black and gold best to represent since 1998.

So it’s done. This morning Mr. Budd and I presented How To Be A Web Design Superhero at SXSWi. For budding superheroes, our presentation slides are now online (PDF 13.5Mb). I want to say a great big thank-you to everyone for coming, Mr.

I am so pleased today to announce that a new beta build of IE7 (I call it the MIX 06 release) will be available from MIX 06, March 20th to 22nd. The new browser will be handed out at MIX and will then hopefully be available from MSDN.

A busy few months of travel are ahead in Malarkey world. I’m very much looking forward to what’s coming up, to meeting old friends and making new ones.

With awareness of standards and accessibility being raised by groups such as WaSP, companies and organisations across many sectors have adopted standards. Sometimes their decision to do so might have been commercial, other times out of a need to comply.

In the news this week, three times winner of the Tour De France and occassional web designer Jeffrey Veen announced that MeasureMap has been acquired by Yahoo, AltaVista, Starbucks, Google.

In the news this week, three times winner of the Tour De France and occassional web designer Jeffrey Veen announced that MeasureMap has been aquired by Yahoo, AltaVista, Starbucks, Google.

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, a young man’s thoughts turn to love and as with any matter of the heart, there is often a dilemma involved. What should be my next purchase from Apple?

Explaining about the difference in northern British accents, a conversation metaphorically headed up the M6 motorway, through the inevitable roadworks to Manchester.

Back in October 2005, the Internet Explorer team urged developers to begin removing CSS hacks in favour of conditional comments.

So, according to those slipping the new IE7 Beta Preview out of it’s sleeve and slapping it down on the music-center, Internet Explorer 7 breaks my site. I can’t say that this was much of a surprise.

My good friend (and evil genius) Brothercake has today released an update to Invasion of the Body Switchers. Updating the classic ALA Style Switcher to accommodate multiple users and devices, including some that are not even traditional browsers, all from a…

MJ is taking a road trip (you can see her images on Flickr ). After 13 hours of driving, she’s covered just over 1000 miles from San Francisco to Tuscon in Arizona via Los Angeles, San Diego and Phoenix, on her way to Dallas.

A new year and tv commercial breaks are full of advertisements for partworks magazines. The choice is so vast that I really don’t know which ones to choose.

Today I heard a rumour that there’s gonna be something big happening in London this summer. When I say big, I mean big and pulled off by some of the biggest names in the business.

Mickey Spillane, Frank Miller, Hakon Wium Lie: Three of my favourite thriller writers. No really, because alongside Spillane’s’My Gun Is Quick’ and Miller’s’The Hard Goodbye’, another thriller hit the book stores web just in time for Christmas; Lie’s CSS3…

Way back when, I listed my favourite top ten phrases that people search for to find my site. Now thanks to the wonders of MeasureMap, it’s time for ten more.

I’ve alluded to it recently, and now after not much blood but one or two tears I’m ready to show and tell. The new design for Karova.com is out there. The new site is geared towards promoting Karova’s development framework).

At the beginning of last month I advocated a quiet revolution and wrote, Fighting a solitary campaign for standards within any organisation must lead inevitably to frustration if the responses are either negative or apathetic.

Although it comes as no surprise following his string of alcohol related illnesses, the news that British footballing legend George Best has died is no less very sad.

Many thanks for all the kind birthday wishes over the weekend, it’s not everyday that you reach […];). By way of a thank-you to all the kind people that I have met and others who occassionally stumble drunk across my site, here is a layout experiment which I…

Ian Lloyd has today published an email interview over at Accessify, Accessibility, the gloves come off. There are now so many web sites, blogs or publications devoted to helping people learn standards and accessible techniques that there are now no excuses…

As I head for London, I thought that you might like a sneaky peek at the presentation slides which I have prepared for next week’s Carson Workshop’s CSS For Designers events.

Over recent days I have recieved a number of emails from people asking for my reaction to Disney Store UK’s decision to move from valid and semantic XHTML and AA-AAA WAI compliance to an invalid HTML site which fails to meet Priority 1 accessibility…

Over the last few weeks I have had several interesting conversations with web standards enthusiasts who work within institutions.

With Molly and I in session for Carson Workshops in only a few weeks and our presentation materials near completion, I have become interested in what audiences need or expect from presentation slides.

As standards enthusiasts, I think that we are often guilty of a little navel gazing when it comes to web design. In many open discussions on WSA or Style Gala, the conversation can often turn to the importance of semantics and validation and sometimes (not…

Released today, Paul Weller’s new album As Is Now isn’t the return to form which I expected. It’s better. A tour-de-force! Weller at his most spectacular for almost ten years.

I’ve been aching to write about Measure Map, the first product from those cool hombres over at Adaptive Path. Now that Jeff Veen has written about Measure Map today, I can hopefully prevent my sides from splitting with gleeful excitement by writing about this…

NB: First published in 2005. Read the up-to-date version and see the latest demo. Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and geeks!

It was announced yesterday that one of the most influential artists of the British 1960’s art movement, Patrick Caulfied, died on Thursday.

Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks You that never done nothin’ But build…

(This one sneaked out while I was teaching in Cupertino) As a studio we work on a number of e-commerce projects each year.

I love my Nano, I want to keep it close, keep it safe. My Nano is so precious, I can’t bear to think of it getting scratched.

Malarkey: I’m trying to decide between an iPod and a nano. Do you have a 4Gb nano in stock? Apple Eddie: No way. Sorry man, they’re like, hot right now. We could be waiting like days for those.

I’m not sure if this has come up before or if indeed it is of any interest (after all, why would anyone want to hide CSS styles from Safari?). But if you’re still here, this is a new (to me) method.

I’m sorry to all my overseas friends (and possibly those of you under 30) who probably won’t have the faintest clue what I’m talking about, but the BBC Doctor Who web site last week announced the return of the Doctor’s once faithful dog, K9.

I love a good book and nothing helps me relax more than disappearing into a good crime or mystery novel. Mickey Spillane, Elmore Leonard, Colin Dexter, all great story tellers who keep you guessing right up until the last few pages.

A major brand name redesigning and implementing their web site with web standards can still be big news. When that brand belongs to one of the most influential sites of modern web design, the news is bigger.

With the launch of the Dutch after school club standards group Happy Clog and the proliferation of WaSP working groups, it seems that (maybe for warmth) standards geeks and designers are cuddling up.

One of the things which I love so much about southern France is colour, the way in which man-made colours are affected by the elements and in particular the strength of the sun.

I’m back. Tanned, rested, fired-up and ready with news of a special design and CSS workshop event happening in November in old London town.

Anyone’round here not realise I’m a big fan of Paul Weller? Thought not. Well, the Modfather has a new single released today and without so much as a pre-listen, it’s arrived by vintage Lambretta and straight into iTunes.

I’m very lucky. I get to work with some great clients and I’m currently working with a very cool consultancy company. Part of the brief was to do something which no one in his industry had done before and I wanted this to involve code as well as design.

You might imagine that accessibility specialists are slightly odd folk. Close your eyes and imagine them sitting quietly in the corner of a pub, sipping mild and wearing Hush Puppies.

Scribbling furiously away during @media (Ed says: What? You weren’t listening to the wise words? ), the highly talented Kevin Mears made drawings of the speakers. […] those famous ears was just too good to miss.

Remember Dealing with telephone salesmen, Dealing with window salesmen or Dealing with kitchen salesmen? Well, the phone gags live on. Here was a recent one. You probably know how it is, this time you’re at work and the phone rings.

In 1649 to St. George’s Hill A ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people’s will They defied the landlords, they defied the laws They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs.

Travelling around the London Underground, it is difficult not to notice a series of posters for the British Legion’s Victory Thanks campaign. Among all the advertising for theatres and stores, these Victory Thanks posters stand out as striking and evocative.

Every now and again I pull out the tin and sift through its contents, photographs and other small treasures which my Grandad thought important.

School music teacher: (To class) Who would like to learn a musical instrument? Teacher: What instrument would you like to learn?

Lights going out and a kick in the balls. That’s Entertainment. A police car and a screaming siren A pneumatic drill and ripped up concrete A baby wailing and stray dog howling The screech of brakes and lamp light blinking That’s Entertainment.

Accessibility is a hot topic again with many mature and interesting discussions taking place. Now the Web Standards Project (WaSP) announces the WaSP Accessibility Task Force.

Positive steps which governments could take to promote a more rapid move towards an accessible web. Following on from Accessibility and a society of control;

Since I delivered my (slightly modified) Anatomy of a Mouse presentation at @media2005, I’ve had time to formalise my thinking about my answer to one of the questions from the audience.

It’s amazing what people buy and sell on eBay. A quick Google reveals some crazy fools, with some of my favourites including someone selling (and bidding on) a Russian military patrol boat (No sale though, the highest bid of $85,100 did not meet minimum…

Well, it’s a wrap. @media2005 has drawn to a close tonight and a four hour train journey back to Wales has given me not only the chance for a bit of a snooze, watch Mona Lisa on my iBook but gather my thoughts about the last couple of days of what I hope…

A little WordPl@y Bujumbura Prestidigitation Raconteur Superannuation Perinaeum Beefcake Phalangist Anthrompomorphize Didactic

Dateline London. Later this month, Waterloo in South London will be the place to be as the great and the good gather and @media 2005 rolls into town.

Don MacLean may have sung it before in American Pie, but today surely must be the day the music died. Well perhaps died is too severe, but today for me must be the day that popular music reached an all time low.

It’s now only two weeks until @media2005 in London, and the (now sold out) event looks set to be one of the biggest web occassions the UK has seen so far. It will be interesting to see how @media’s style differs in comparison to SXSW.

When I reached the studio this morning, (Ed says: Malarkey is always grumpy before 11am. ) there was a mysterious box sitting on my desk. Open the box! shouted the voices in my head, so guess what? I opened the box!

Working with other designers or developers on any project can often be tricky. But imagine what it would be like if there were 29 other people working on the same CSS file!

In Too Many Cooks I invited 30 designers and developers to contribute to a single CSS file. It has been interesting to see the CSS styles roll in and now we have a finished result.

I’ve been passed the baton by John Oxton in a new musical pass the parcel, so I thought I’d use this to explore the depths of my record collection. 9.65Gb on my PC laptop. (Oh how I’m looking forward transfering it to my (soon to be arriving) iBook.)

I want to say a huge thank-you for all the kind comments about my new design. As you can imagine, a lot of time goes into making a total redesign, and often designing for yourself is harder than designing for client projects.

Applying id and (multiple) class attributes to the element is a fantastic way to turn the same XHTML configuration into multiple design layouts without the need for adding different attributes to div elements.

It’s here. I’ve been meaning to redesign this site for a little while now and since I have emerged from my black, depressive state, the urge was getting too strong to ignore. I just had to do it.

Whereas many have already publicly switched from MovableType to other brands of blogging software, some for technical and others for economic reasons, I am sticking to MT.

Well, I’ve been hinting at it for a little while now and now here it is, an all new And All That Malarkey. Not simply a lick of paint, but a complete new design, ground-up re-code and a CSS shake-up.

Some of you may remember that one of my first (and most visited) columns way back in May last year was about creating colour palettes from only two colours plus black and white.

Evil genius Brothercake has been busy in his secret laboratory and the result is a chicken with eight legs massive update to IOTBS - a full new version 2 release entitled’IOTBS: Look Who’s Switching Too’.

Summer, Buddy Holly, the working folly Good golly Miss Molly and boats Hammersmith Palais, the Bolshoi Ballet Jump back in the alley and nanny goats 18-wheeler Scammels, Domenecker camels All other mammals plus equal votes Seeing Piccadilly, Fanny Smith and…

With less than a month to go until the General Election, here in the UK you can’t seem to get away from inanely grinning politicos squeezing palms and kissing babies for the cameras.

I wrote a little while ago about the UK Labour Party’s early campaign posters and now with the capitalist scam democratic process well underway here, I thought I’d take a look at what the UK Conservative Party is hoping will grab our attention and make us…

As some of you might know, I like to work on e-commerce store designs. Part of what fascinates me about making sites designed to do business is the psychology of designing for e-commerce.

Spending five minutes exploring Google Labs today, I came across Mr. Google’s Site-Flavored Google Search, not by any means a new Lab experiment (6/17/04) but one which was tantalisingly labelled Improved!. To quote Mr.

This is neither a permanent redesign, nor to be a regular event, I just fancied a bit of fun as it’s the day for it. Go on, hit’refresh’, I dare yer! (No markup was injured during the making of this site.)

Oh my, I’m a sucker for bad movies! I’m sure we all have our favourites, but here is one of mine. Janice Starlin was the face that sold a million cosmetics, but eighteen years on, her business is declining as she grows older. Then she meets the eccentric Dr.

Drive through most towns in the UK (and probably elsewhere in the world) and you’ll see a hairdresser in the main street.

Image replacement is a topic which keeps reappearing on websites and in books. There are whole sections devoted to the pros and cons of each method in books such as Web Standards Solutions and The Zen of CSS Design.

If I banked with Barclays, I might have been caught out by this email I received this morning. No word of a lie, this is the real deal! Tsih emlia was setn by the Barclays serevr to veirfy yoru emial aerddss.

Some of you may have read about’Durstan’ being left off the cover of the up-and-coming Professional CSS book. So, in the style of Where’s Waldo, let’s play Where’s Durstan?!

I’ll never be able to show my face in Austin again, and I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise publically to… All that’s left to say is an enormous thank-you to everyone who made me and the rest of the Brit Pack sooooo welcome in Texas.

SXSW was the venue for Ethan Marcotte to announce the up-and-coming publication of Professional CSS, a new book by Christopher Schmitt, Dan Cederholm, Porter Glendinning, Mark Trammell, Dunstan Orchard and Ethan himself.

If you’re here in Austin, let me know and I’ll add yours to the list.

Reading Andy Budd’s SXSW Day 0 post this morning, I thought (cue Monty Python voice) You lucky, lucky bastard!;) While Andy and the other Brit Packers were sipping Frozen Margaritas and munching Tex Mex food, Hicks and I were still struggling with getting to…

This coming Thursday I’m taking a plane from Manchester to Austin Texas (via Chicago) bound for SXSW. It’s my first time in Texas so I’m looking forward to bumping into some famous Texans.

This coming Thursday I’m taking a plane from Manchester to Austin Texas (via Chicago) bound for SXSW. It’s my first time in Texas so I’m looking forward to bumping into some famous Texans.

A while ago (when I couldn’t sleep), I sat up late watching re-runs of home decorating shows on UK TVStyle, a channel wall-to-wall with house make-overs.

Back in November I was approached for an interview by a very nice chap from Japan, Yasuhisa Hasegawa, who was writing a book on design and web standards. I’m sure that Yasuhisa won’t mind me quoting a little bit from his email to me.

Almost once a week during meetings with clients or prospective clients, I need to explain the concept of web standards. Sometimes it’s during a pitch, and always to a non-technical person who knows little or nothing about anything remotely ‘webby.’ I have…

Yes, it’s true. Today I met the President. No, not George Dubya, but Rhodri Morgan, the President of Wales! Well actually that’s not quite true either.

I’ve written in previous columns about how working with wire-frames and grey-box page layouts during a site’s planning and early design stages can improve efficiency and enable client sign-off points.

Some of you may recall that way back in June last year, Stuff and Nonsense grew up, moved away from home and got a place of its own. I wasn’t so sure about the move at the time, but (happily) I was proved wrong and it’s been a good move.

It’s always gratifying when someone calls or emails out-of-the-blue and says something like, Can you do… for us?. It’s even nicer when that person is halfway across the world.

I’ve been experimenting with a’magazine contents’ or news style page for a current project and thought I’d give it a whirl here.

Oooo, how I envy real artistic talent - to be able to create a piece of artwork from nothing more than paper or canvas, pencils or paints is a talent I wish I had more of.

Just like Scrivs announced this week that the CSS Vault has been sold, this site too has a new owner and I’d like to introduce him to you. His name is Malarkey. (Ed: What are you rambling on about now?) OK, I’ll get to the point.

An open apology to all sales-people adversely affected by recent columns. Please accept my heart-felt apologies for potentially causing you so many wasted sales calls.

OK, I can’t resist it. If you enjoyed Dealing with telephone salesmen, Dealing with window salesmen or Dealing with kitchen salesmen (and I hope you did) here is one last bash at cold callers.

OK, if you enjoyed Dealing with telephone salesmen and Dealing with window salesmen (and I hope you did) here is another. I’m not going to flog a dead horse, so this will be the last for a while.

You probably know how it is, you’re just sitting down to dinner (perhaps in front of your favourite TV show) when the phone rings. Salesman Hello, can I speak to the person responsible for your gas/electricity/telephone/bills, please?

OK, if you enjoyed the last one (and I hope you did) here is another. In case you missed it, you probably know how it is, you’re just sitting down to dinner (perhaps in front of your favourite TV show) when the phone rings, Hello, can I speak to the person…

Oh my kiddy aunt, it’s started already. Driving through Warrington yesterday, I caught my first glimpse of the UK Labour Party’s first campaign posters for the up-and-coming (to a church hall near you) General Election.

I love this!;) More about it another day…

As a company, we give each member of the team a ’25.00 per month allowance to spend at Amazon on anything they think will benefit the company. We don’t vet what people buy, it’s a way of encouraging them to expand their knowledge (and our range of skills).

It seems to be the season for discussion on rips, with Shaun Inman and Dave Shea both again highlighting design theft and the most professional methods for dealing with such occurrances. I’m not interested in going over old ground.

London is most definately the place to be in June this year. Why? Well @media2005, that’s why! With speakers including Jeffrey Zeldman, Joe Clark, Douglas Bowman, Patrick Griffiths, Andy Budd, Jeremy Keith and, err, me … this looks like the web event of the…

Jason Santa Maria recently published a highly insightful article Fighting Off Design Stagnation in the latest issue of Design In-Flight magazine. This is the first time I have read DIF and I am genuinely impressed.

Whether working alone or as part of a team, there are many separate tasks in any project. If you are working as a team it is important that everybody involved understands the structural requirements needed to implement a design, and even if working alone it…

When I was working (on my own) in the studio between Christmas and New Year, I played the Live Aid DVD which the guys bought me for my birthday.

Andy Budd has announced BlogAid, asking you to pledge the earnings from advertising, affiliate programs or site sponsorship made from your site during January to your countries local Earthquake and Tsunami appeal.

I’d just finished reading Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s Long Way Round book (kindly given by Sue’s Mum for my birthday at the end of November) when the DVD pops into my Christmas stocking (this time, nicely gift wrapped for my brother by Amazon (lazy…

IOTBS: The Director’s Cut has been improved in the latest release resulting in a far more sophisticated tool, with better accessibility, and a greater range of possible uses. For links to the latest files, see the IOTBS resources page.

Well, it’s time for me to head off to the Stuff and Nonsense office Christmas party. It’s the same every year… I have too many drinks, then chat up the gorgeous girl from accounts, before heading off to her place for…;) Thing is, I never regret it in the…

My CSS Zen Garden submission, unimaginatively titled’Invasion of the Body Switchers’, has been accepted. Thanks Dave!:D

We are in the final stages of completing our project for Young Flintshire, an initiative for young people in the county. And the process of design has taken many things from the stuff that I have talked about this week.

Most recently, Paul Chadwick has recieved much critical acclaim for his work on comic-book movie tie-ins such as Star Wars and the Matrix.

I love comic books (you might have guessed that already), not just because of the stories or the artwork (or because I long to wear a cape and jump off the wardrobe), but because I admire the’process’ and teamwork which goes into creating them.

Two of my favourite comic books artists excel in black and white illustration, the first, Frank Miller is better known for his work on Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and more recently, Sin City.

When I didn’t know what colour to put down, I put down black. Black is a force: I depend on black to simplify the construction.

Testing a site design to ensure the widest practical audience should be an essential part of the design process on every web site. Of course in an ideal world, every web site developed would be tested both for usability and accessibility using real people.

I’ve been meaning to write more about my current thoughts on accessibility for a while now. In the last week I received (among many) some interesting emails on the subject and this has spurred me into writing.

NB: This article refers to a prior version of the WWF UK online store that I designed in 2004. I was pleased to learn yesterday that our work has won the ECMOD 2004 (European Catalogue and Mail Order Days) Best Charity/Good Cause Related Catalogue Award for…

I thought that it might be fun to talk a bit more about design for a while rather than standards, and release a few work-in-progress designs for sites that will be launched in the next few weeks.

Here it is, the new Stuff and Nonsense portfolio site. I always find it hard to design our own company portfolio site. So this time I took a different approach and decided to concentrate on the content first and let content dictate the design.

Invasion of the Body Switchers by me and Brothercake is now published over at A List Apart.

Saturday afternoon was spent in pleasant company at Tate Modern, walking the galleries and thumbing through hefty books in the shop. Conversations were often focussed on the arts and there were some very thought provoking works to see.

It’s funny how you build up a mental people before you meet them. So this weekend was going to be interesting as a band of Brit Pack bloggers, accompanied by their roadies and groupies, met up in London for art, beer and a bit of a chin wag.

As Colly referred to earlier, a wild bunch of bad-ass Brit bloggers are meeting up in London this weekend. Now I know what a few of the guys (and gal) look like from occasional blog pictures, but you know how photos can deceive.

Introducing Donny, six days old when this picture was taken and coming to live with us sometime during Christmas.

it made me sit back and wonder if’we’ in the web-standards’community’ have anything left to say about standards. It’s been a short, but busy few years since deploying standards for day-to-day, commercial web ventures became practical.

I’m damn sure that like coffee and cigarettes, blogs contain some chemical that makes them addictive. Just because I felt like it, I’ve been tinkering again with And All That Malarkey, although this time the changes are mostly’under the duvet’.

Referrer logs, we pretend to ignore them but let’s be honest, we take a peek in there once in a while. Personally I love’em, and having a quick rummage has become a bit of a habit.

Photographers commonly use depth-of-field to emphasise certain parts of image by de-focusing others such as backgrounds. Our eyes are naturally drawn to the sharpest part of any image.

We’ve been wanting a chocolate labrador puppy for a while now and got the good news today that a litter that we have been waiting for has just been born in a nearby village.

I don’t want to tread on Dan’s or his Simple Quiz toes, but… I’ve been trying recently to better optimise my CSS, and this has lead me to wonder where certain rules are best arranged. So with that, and with this example of a navigation list in mind.

(For the non-Brits (or anyone too young to remember), the picture is actor Robert Lindsay in the BBC’s 1977 sit-com, Citizen Smith written by John Sullivan who went on to write Only Fools and Horses.

I’ve been thinking about making a CSS Zen Garden entry for a little while now, but before I think about design, I wanted to understand the Garden’s XHTML structure.

Day four: I couldn’t say thank-you enough to all the people who left kind comments about the 2004 Disney Store UK project, here, at CSS Beauty, CSS Vault, and Style Gala.

Day three: I ran through how the 2004 Disney Store UK was developed, looking specifically at XSLT. The 2004 Disney Store UK website was developed using an ecommerce platform called Karova Store.

I’m not going to be blogging now for the next two weeks as I have a few projects which need my undivided attention. But rather than let rumours of my untimely death circulate, I thought that I would let you know and leave you with a wee competition, just for…

Day two: First of all I wanted to say the biggest “thank you” to everyone who gave their time to review the accessibility decisions that I made during the design and build of the 2004 Disney Store UK.

Day one: A skip through some of the markup and styles I used on the 2004 Disney Store UK store. One of the things that I found fascinating then about working with CSS was the application of new techniques to solve the real dilemmas which crop up during a site…

It was a busy ten days in the web-standards world. Jeffrey Zeldman was a new dad (congratulations) and Dave and Doug made big noises in Australia at Web Essentials. Here was my news in October 2004.

It’s been a very busy few months in Malarkey world. (I’ve got a big announcement to make tomorrow.) Anyway, as our American cousins have been splashing blood around their sites in the run up to Halloween, I thought that I would splash a little colour around…

When awarding the latest version of the Mozilla site a WSA Silver Star, Johan pointed to the mozilla.org Markup Reference.

I’ve just awarded my first Silver Star over at the Web Standards Awards. My award goes to the edgy and unconventional Red Labor. Now I’m not going to make a habit of posting awarded sites both here and on WSA. This is the first time and definately the last.

Following on from the recent discussion about accessible alternatives for complex graphics and images, Bob Easton made an interesting point which compounds browsers’ lousy support for the longdesc attribute, Yet another reason to avoid LONGDESC … There is…

I’m working on the early stages of my new design company web site and I have become interested in the subject of accessible, ’alternative’ content for complex graphics and images, in particular portfolio images and screen captures of client sites.

Forget Superman or the Hulk, the Fantastic Four or (God forbid) Captain America! When I was a kid there was only one comic book hero, the mighty Judge Dredd.

I need your advice on something please guys, if you can spare the time. I started this site for a number of reasons, most of them pretty half-baked.

We’re back from the south of France, two weeks without the phone, email or MSN. At home, my usual morning routine runs something like this, In France it’s a little bit different; two weeks of,

We’re packed and ready to go. The South of France is calling and I’m looking forward to two weeks of quality time away from the phone, emails and MSN.

This is likely to be my last column before I take off for France on Saturday for a two week holiday with Sue and Alex. We have just completed a small site redo for a long standing client, the Empire Hotel in Llandudno, North Wales.

In 2004—after eight weeks, 1,600 cups of coffee, 1,920 cigarettes, 16 pork sausages and one instant BBQ—I was pleased to announce the launch of a new online store for WWF UK.

Stuff and Nonsense is in the final stages of testing a new e-commerce store for a client (more about that when the site goes live on Wednesday).

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about fluid layout design over recent weeks and have made it my goal to attempt fluid (or fluid/elastic hybrid) layouts with each new design. And you know what? It’s a damn site harder than I thought it would be.

In a recent conversation with Swedish web accessibility advocate Tommy Olsson, Tommy impressed on me again the importance of fluid, rather than the more commonly used fixed-width design techniques that I and so many others designers favour.

A discussion at Accessify got me thinking about the usefulness of compliance badges or icons. What purpose do they serve the public who have little knowledge or interest in accessibility or code validity?

Web forms often ask users for both essential and non-essential (marketing purposes and research) information. Long and complicated forms can often slow down the progress through a web site and in the case of e-commerce, can seriously hinder the sales process.

J’ai’t’ tr’s’tonn’ et satisfait par les nombres de liens ’, et des commentaires au sujet et sur de cet emplacement par des visiteurs de l’ext’rieur du monde d’expression anglaise.

Looking back at an old site I made for a client made my rethink the way that that I have been coding my sites over recent months. So much so, that I thought I’d look again at the code structure of this blog and redevelop the HTML in a totally different way.

Simon Collison opened a can of worms recently when his (rather fantastic) personal site launched with the now famous’ticks’ for visited navigation links.

Time travel. It’s a subject that often keeps me awake at night, pondering… So I thought I’d interview a bunch of bloggers to help me out. Thanks to Brit Packers Andy Budd, Simon Collison, Jon Hicks, Gordon Mackay, Tim Parkin and Richard Rutter.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, bloody, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Swiss, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,…

Eric Meyer’s recent comments about my original What’s in a name column have prompted me draw some conclusions from the comments and suggestions made on And All That Malarkey and elsewhere. First I want to lay a few ghosts to rest.

Forgive me if you think that I’m a lot obsessed with colour and with Macromedia Fireworks at the moment. If you’re bored with both these topics, play with this instead.;).

In the first of an occassional column on one of my favourite graphics applications (the largely under-rated) Macromedia Fireworks, I thought I’d write about how I often use a combination of Fireworks MX and XML to create a site-full of graphical text headers…

I love you. I have loved you as far back as I can remember. I think I have always loved you. I visit you many times every day and sometimes when I am sleeping, I dream that you come to visit me too.

A number of designers and developers have asked me for recommendations on how to layout product range pages using semantic mark-up and CSS. So I decided to write a mini tutorial for our training manual and try it out here first.

Cum on Eng-er-laaand! It’s only five days until our boys take on France in Euro 2004. So to get us in the mood for some superb footy action, here is my Web Imitates Football Quiz. Can you guess which European team strips inspired these colour palettes?

I have been pondering whether or not to replace my personal design machine with a shiny new Apple PowerBook. A new Mac will certainly give me the power and flexibility that I need and looks sooooo sexy too!

As the world’s attention is focussed on northern France and the commemorations marking the 60th anniversary of D-Day, I am reflecting more than I have ever done before on the events of sixty years ago.

Andy Budd wrote about Semantic Coding and said, This got me thinking about the benefits of naming conventions and I began to realise that these conventions matter, not just for the sake of web designers (and easier site redesigns), but for users too!

More than 100 artworks from the famous Charles Saatchi’s collection have been destroyed in a warehouse fire. Among the many pieces of contemporary artists’ work destroyed were works by Tim Noble and Sue Webster, who I had the pleasure of knowing at art school…

An eagerness to please should always push a designer to do the best for a client. But there are times where just when you thought the job was finished, a client will say, Can we just add… The four stage sign-off sheet can be our best friend.

As part of a current young peoples’ project for our local Flintshire Council, Stuff and Nonsense has commissioned the talents of a young illustrator, Holly, to design a cast of characters for a new web site.

I can’t think of many web sites that don’t include at least one form, and I can’t think how many times I have compromised on a form’s visual design because of looming deadlines, leaving a Must get around to styling this form properly comment in the code.

Today I discovered that the fantastic Cameron Adams had nominated our work for Goppa Fireplaces for a Web Standards Award. My smile got so big that my face almost split, thanks Cameron!

My recent post on creating colour palettes, combined with a conversation on painting with my friend Sue, (a Fine Art student at Liverpool University) got me thinking more about colour inspiration for web design.

Over the weekend, I installed iTunes on all the computers in the design studio and centralised our entire CD collection on the server.

Standards-based designers often appear to loath Microsoft’s behemoth browser, sometimes for good reasons. Internet Explorer’s patchy support for W3C CSS (particularly attribute selectors), its non support for the abbr tag or PNG transparency on the Windows…

Why are certain types of criminals glamorous? Not murderers or muggers, but forgers, safe crackers and con-artists. From the fictional Italian Jobster Charlie Crocker (original, not remake) to the late Great Train Robber, Ronnie Biggs, I see a certain romance…

When I am designing a colour scheme for a client site, I am often lead by the colours used in existing logos or publicity materials. But when the client only uses one or two colours, I use a favourite technique for creating complimentary tones.

This is And All That Malarkey, where I write about stuff that takes my fancy. I hope you like what you read.

Way back when the web was young and active volcanos spewed molten rock into the sea just north of Morecambe, I dodged falling boulders and lava flows and headed into my local bookcave.

(In a change from the advertised programming,) I’m appealing for Fine Art painters to contribute to an up-and-coming project.

When I sold my shares in Karova earlier this year, many people wrote to me asking whether or not I was still using Karova Store (KS2) accessible, css based e-commerce software for my clients and whether I would still recommended it to them.

Back in June 2004, I wrote about a new chapter in the story of Stuff and Nonsense, the design company that I have owned since 1998. It was at that time that I combined the running of the two businesses that I owned, Stuff and Nonsense and Karova.

It is the first new month after the relaunch of And All That Malarkey and for the redesign I introduced a new Editorials category. As a single author site, you might be wondering why there is a need for such a category.

I’m working on a special little something and with my begging cap firmly pressed on my head, I’m asking for your help. This little something involves me looking at newspaper typography from around the world.

Yes it’s another Transcending CSS, book related grovel. If you or anyone you know owns a vintage (or semi-vintage) Lambretta or Vespa scooter and you live in or close to Manchester (UK), please read on.

Carson Workshops have announced a second day and limited availability for the CSS for Designers Workshop in London. I am very pleased that demand for seats at the workshop has been so high as to require a second day.

Along with so many others, And All That Malarkey has gone naked today, swept away on a tide of mass hypnosis. How did this happen to me?

A comparison table of fourty web site’s naming conventions

Working life at Stuff and Nonsense has been very hectic of late, infact there has rarely been a day off in the last twelve months.

About thirty years ago, my Mum had a friend called Reg, an ex-army chappy with a gruff manner and a rhodesian ridgeback dog called Simba. It was a huge creature. But this is not about Reg, or his dog.

With the many excellent design and CSS resources and blogs available, there seems little point in my humbly chiming in. Nor can I compete with the staggering talents of Shaun or Jon.

Transcending CSS seems to be doing rather well so far, largely I’m sure down to those kind people who places cover buttons on their sites to help promote it.

Read the original hCup column. Group stage Group A Germany Poland Costa Rica Equador Group B England Sweden Paraguay Trinidad & Tobago Group C Argentina Holland Serbia & Montenegro Ivory Coast Group D Mexico Portugal Iran Angola Group E Italy Czech Republic…

While conferences are still at the front of my thoughts, I thought it about time to announce the WOW Web Design and Project Management Conference in Silicon Valley in September.

I was very pleased to have been invited by Bert Bos to briefly speak alongside him and AOL’s Kevin Lawver at WWW2006 in Edinburgh.