Blogging and all that Malarkey

Smashing Magazine are hosting a series of one day workshops across Europe throughout November and December.

Today I’m over in Oslo, Norway, giving a talk at Accessibility Day 2013 (Google translated link). My topic is “Designing an atmosphere of accessibility” and I cover how I think focussing on content first as part of responsive design, and in particular working on design ‘atmosphere’ (typography, colour and texture) helps better, more accessible design. My slides for the talk are already available on SpeakerDeck, but of course, you really had to be here.

Getting excited yet? With the 50th anniversary episode and the Day Of The Doctor just over a month away, I am. I’m also looking forward to the Unfinished Business Doctor Who Special with Jon HIcks too. We’re recording that the day after the Day and publishing it the day after that.

Exactly ten years ago today, on October 20th 2003, A List Apart published Doug Bowman’s Sliding Doors of CSS.

On Unfinished Business this week, Designer and author of A Pocket Guide to CSS Animations Val Head joins me to talk about practical uses for CSS animations, how small publishers have made publishing books more accessible to first time authors and, of course, The Sooty Show.

2012’s Smashing Conference in Freiburg had the best atmosphere of any European conference I’ve been to and, while I wasn’t there, I hear this year’s was pretty special too.

This week, illustrator Josh Cleland joins me to talk about how far we can go using a movie or TV character’s likeness, the differences between an illustrator’s and a web designer’s contract and Josh’s “100% satisfaction guarantee.”

Brad Frost: As multi-device Web design quickly becomes the norm, the throw-it-over-the-fence style of creating websites is going to be increasingly difficult. The modern Web design process requires intense collaboration between designers and front-end developers. Real collaboration and communication are difficult, but we must get over that awkwardness in order to overcome the design/development divide. His post reminds me a little of my Walls Come Tumbling Down presentation slides and transcript. It is often quite scary how alike our thinking is.

It was lovely to hear Laura Kalbag talk about accessibility at Revolution in Shrewsbury a week or more ago. Especially as I’ll be doing the same in Oslo in a couple of weeks. I’m returning to conference speaking at Accessibility Day 2013 (Google translated link) run by those fine people at Northern Beat. My topic is “Designing an atmosphere of accessibility” and I’ll cover how I think focussing on content first as part of responsive design, and in particular working on design ‘atmosphere’ (typography, colour and texture) helps accessible design. Then the following day (gulp) I’ll be in Scarborough at #TIDE 2013. I’m looking forward to this event enormously as I finally get to meet my CSS hero Harry Roberts and see a few old friends there too. I’ll be talking about “How to call your client an idiot without getting fired” (no guarantees) which is a lot more serious than it sounds as it’s all about encouraging better client participation in design projects. I’ve given this talk once before and this time, like the last, there’ll be no slides, just me. It’s been a while and I’m justifiably nervous about both talks for different reasons, but it’ll feel good to be back.

In this week’s show, Alex’s friend Brad Frost, who having survived his trip to Brighton, returns to talk to me about designing ‘in the open’ and what the benefits for us and the people and organisations we’re working for can be. Listen now