Blogging and all that Malarkey

Everyone loved stickers, right? And t-shirts? Right again. And gorillas? Of course you do, especially Errol. Now you can stick Errol stickers on the things you stick stickers on and proudly wear Errol on your chest. (Chest beating optional.)

This week, I’m back on the Boagworld podcast to talk about the ‘ Exciting Future of Grid Layout’and the design possibilities supported by CSS Grid. I enjoyed recording it with Paul and Marcus enormously and I think that it’s one of the best shows I’ve recorded in a while.

When I was redesigning my website recently I decided on a tongue-in-cheek new footer. Even though the idea behind my help page was tongue-in-cheek, I’m serious about the advice it gives.

One of the reasons for my redesigning this website was to make it more appropriate for the work I’ve been making most recently, but also as an opportunity for it to better reflect me as a person. A big part of that was the writing that I did in what I think of as my blogging ‘heyday.’

Speaking at conferences has been one of the best things that I’ve done over the past decade plus some. Not just the standing on stage doing the talking part, and the traveling to fabulous places (and Scarborough) part, but the coming up with stories to tell and lessons to teach part too.

A few weeks ago I was writing content for my speaking information for conference organisers page and I wondered about other speakers’ ‘terms of business’ and how much—if anything—they charged. To get a feeling for how people approach the business of speaking, I set up a quick survey.

Looking back, I’ve redesigned this website roughly every three years. Today I’m proud to show you the new Stuff & Nonsense.

Back in January I wrote about why I believe that style guides and component/pattern libraries should be beautiful as well as functional. That to be effective, they must cater for the different needs of creative and technical people by inspiring as well as informing.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to share some of the things that I’ve learned while designing and developing Inspired Guides, starting today with using HTML entities as separators in breadcrumb navigation.

I gave a new talk on designing inspired style guides last week at Design Exchange Nottingham. It was a really good night, a fabulous audience which was double their normal attendance and I also got the chance to sink a few drinks with my old friend Harry. It’s very likely that I won’t give this talk again in Europe this year, and I wanted to share it with more people, so I’ve written a transcript to accompany the slides. NB: This page contains 8Mb of images. I’ve optimised them as much as possible, but you probably don’t want to load this page using your mobile data plan.