Blogging and all that malarkey

Yours truly over at the Envato blog: “What do giant spiders, invaders from Mars, and a 50-foot woman have in common? Incredible color. B-movie buff and web design pioneer Andy Clarke shows you how the over-the-top palettes of horror and sci-fi posters can inspire memorable color choices for modern websites.”

In this episode of Unfinished Business, Andy and Rich talk with writer, producer, and alter-ego of Count Binface, Jon Harvey.

“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.

In this episode of Unfinished Business, Andy and Rich talk about the pros and cons of specialising.

Late last year, I turned my wee studio into a space for shooting an hour-long web design inspiration tutorial for Envato. Well, the Lessons from Design Greats video is now live on their YouTube channel, and I’m really pleased with how it turned out.

Yours truly over at the Smashing Magazine: “What’s the best way to make your SVGs faster, simpler, and more manageable? Andy Clarke explains the process he relies on to prepare, optimise, and structure SVGs for animation and beyond.”

Yours truly over at CSS Tricks: “How can you take dialogue box design beyond the generic look of frameworks and templates? How can you style them to reflect a brand’s visual identity and help to tell its stories? Here’s how I do it in CSS using ::backdrop, backdrop-filter, and animations.”

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

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

Yours truly over at the Envato blog: “How can a collection of dog-eared posters from the golden age of British wrestling influence the design of today’s websites? Web design pioneer Andy Clarke steps into the ring to give us the lowdown.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Website design in the ’90s was messy, but it was also magical. It was frequently fraught with accessibility, performance, and usability problems that took us years to solve. But while we addressed them, we discarded much of what was captivating about early websites and replaced them with conservative, commodity designs.

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

Yours truly over at the Envato blog: “Have you ever considered how ’90s animations might relate to web design today? I show how they inspired a new website design for Emmy-winning composer Mike Worth.”

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

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

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

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