Blogging and all that Malarkey

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.