Blogging and all that Malarkey

Talk to my family and friends, and they’ll tell you I never bloody stop talking about the IWC Big Pilot 43 watch that I bought to celebrate my 60th in November. Mechanical watches are all over my social media feeds, and the other day I did a double-take when the algorithm suggested I might like a new design from, of all companies, Timex.

Although we’ve had a smattering of snow here in the Rhineland—where I’m basing myself for a couple of months—at home, an “arctic blast” means snow is threatening. Last week, I added a snow mode to my websites, but my pioneer characters still looked toasty and warm, and unaffected by the wintery conditions. So, it was time for them to get chilly.

I redesigned my contact page animation as a gold mine scene. Here’s how I approached the artwork, structured the SVG, and added subtle ambient animation using CSS.

Winter’s definitely arrived, and there’s a chill wind blowing. We haven’t had snow in the village yet, but it’s falling on my website, courtesy of a new ‘snow mode.’

Yours truly over at the Smashing Magazine: “In this article, pioneering author and web designer Andy Clarke shows his techniques for creating Toon Text titles using modern CSS and SVG.”

While the smart people finish the Academy of Scoring Arts website’s CMS development, I’ve been rummaging through my design files and rediscovered several concepts that didn’t make it into the final design.

I mentioned last week that as well as expanding my Toon Text styles gallery, I’d added a Toon Text generator to help me (and you) create text in the style of those classic cartoon title cards. Now, I’ve launched a major update to both.

Sometimes I don’t want to style a whole word or heading. I want to style individual letters—to nudge a character into place, give one glyph extra weight, or animate a few letters independently. Sadly, some splitting solutions don’t deliver an always accessible result. With the help of a developer pal, I've written my own text splitter, Splinter.js.

Partway through writing an upcoming article for Smashing Magazine, I decided it would be helpful to have a tool to generate text styled like that in my beloved cartoon titles. So I made one.

In this episode of Unfinished Business, Andy and Rich talk about retainers and maintenance contracts, and Andy asks Richard’s advice on how to sell them to new clients. As he’s prone to do, Andy also talks about Wrexham football club.