Blogging and all that Malarkey

I’m looking forward to tomorrow afternoon (May 21st,) and sitting down with Smashing Magazine’s Vitaly Friedman for the second of my Inspired Design Decisions webinars, exclusive for Smashing members. This webinar is my deepest dive so far into the concept of compound grids and how to use them.

With modern CSS properties including Grid, Flexbox, Multi-column, and Shapes, designers have countless opportunities to make diverse, and engaging designs. Sadly, many of us haven’t had the memo which gives us permission to make more interesting work, so I decided to write that memo. Feel free to modify the message for your company or organisation and of course, circulate it to the designers on your team.

One message I wanted to put across when writing my new book was that there are already examples of art direction on the web, in products and on websites. I wanted to showcase some examples in a series of case studies.

While I was researching typefaces for a new project, I came across Dalton Maag’s case study for Universal TV. The type is beautiful, of course, but it was their graphics which got my attention.

Last year, Rachel Andrew wrote an article that took a new look at CSS Shapes in which she reintroduced readers to the basics of using CSS Shapes. In a new tutorial for Smashing Magazine, I expand on the topic of Art Direction for the Web with CSS Shapes to create exciting and inspired new design ideas.

I’ve written plenty of times before about how important it can be to look offline for inspiration to improve the things we make online. Last year, a few friends and I met in London for an inspiring visit to the Photographers Gallery.

To help celebrate the launch of Art Direction For The Web, Smashing TV’s Bruce, Scott and I spent an hour talking about my new book. The video from that conversation is now on the YouTube.

This Art Direction for the Web video course is for web designers and developers who want to understand art direction and how to make digital products and websites better.

As I mentioned on Friday, it’s taken much, much longer to produce, and is itself much, much longer than I’d planned, but my fourth book, Art Direction for the Web, will be published tomorrow. Here’s a little more about what you’ll find in the book’s almost 350 pages.

Did you buy my Art Direction for the Web video course on Vimeo? If you did, you’re entitled to free copies of the ePub, Amazon Kindle, and PDF versions of my new Art Direction for the Web book.