Blogging and all that Malarkey

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.