Blogging and all that Malarkey

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.

You know what it’s like. You decide to make a fun little side project. No need to integrate it into your main codebase. It doesn’t have to have compatible CSS or HTML, so no worries. Then you make another one. Same deal. Then another. Oh. All of a sudden, you have several projects, and there are annoying differences between them.

Yours truly over at CSS Tricks: “I spend an unhealthy amount of time on the typography in my designs, and if you’ve read any traditional typography books, you might remember “the measure.” If not, it’s simply the length of a line of text. But measure means more than that, and once you understand what it represents, it can change how you think about layout entirely.”

I’m not entirely sure how it happened, but it was yours truly’s 60th last week. I spent it in Germany with Sue and Alex and one of the highlights of the trip was buying a watch to celebrate that big birthday.

Last week, I explained my strategy for writing CSS selectors. Today, I’ll explain how I decide on and design layouts. It isn’t really about grids; it’s about a repeatable way to make layout decisions.