Blogging and all that Malarkey

Over the past two years, I’ve noticed a significant drop-off in the number of enquiries from local(ish) businesses coming through Google. I wondered whether that might be down to the fact that the opinionated design isn’t to everyone’s taste, so I tried something. A year ago, I set up a fake web design company.

This workshop is for designers who want to break free from the gridlock and create layouts that feel bold, expressive, and uniquely theirs, without losing clarity or usability.

Yours truly over at the Envato blog: “What if we thought of web design more like a comic book? Comic book nerd and web design pioneer Andy Clarke shows you how the structure of comic book layouts—panels, gutters, and rhythm—can inspire more expressive and narrative-driven web designs.”

Lately, while I’ve been making my Toon Titles and writing about SVG animations, I’ve been pondering where the sweet spot is between CSS and GSAP for animations. This Toon Title, featuring Hanna Barbera’s Quick Draw McGraw in his alter ego El Kabong, illustrates it nicely.

I’ve always loved it when designers take the time to give their blog posts a little extra polish. Jason Santa Maria did this brilliantly on his old site, and my design hero, Trent Walton, made each post feel like a one-off. With my recent code overhaul, I thought—why not do the same?

I’ve been making a load of small changes to this website recently, and I knew that it needed a proper tune-up, especially on mobile, where performance really matters.

With me writing for CSS Tricks, Envato, and Smashing Magazine each month, I’ve added a magazine articles page.

Yours truly over at CSS Tricks: “How can you style drop and initial caps to reflect a brand’s visual identity and help to tell its stories? Here’s how I do it in CSS by combining::first-letter and initial-letter with other unexpected properties, including border-image, and clip-path.

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.

Working to simplify this website’s CSS last week, I updated the pages which promote my CSS Grid templates. I’d called them Layout Love, but I wanted to restyle them as Layout ❤︎. However, I encountered an issue when I checked the pages on iOS and iPadOS, which turned my Unicode characters into emojis.