Blogging and all that Malarkey

I’ve known about daleks all my life.

I decided that this year I would spend more time in universities and with students than I would at conferences. Maybe that’s because my son’s a student and I’d like to think that he’d appreciate a visiting lecturer. Maybe it’s because I’m not ready for the pressure of larger events yet. Whatever the reason, this week was all about students and my visits to Winchester School Of Art and Manchester Metropolitan University.

(That’s “horse meat free” not “free horse meat”.) In this week’s episode of Unfinished Business, Anna and I follow up last week’s episode with listener questions about the professional (and unprofessional) ways to handle business disputes. We also discuss how best to say goodbye to a client and cue up a few movies to watch and talk about ‘after hours’ in the coming weeks.

BLOKK is a font for quick mock-ups and wireframing for clients who do not understand latin. Brilliant! ( via )

You should know by now that I’m a huge fan of Hammer For Mac. I couldn’t and wouldn’t start a project without it as I’d miss its variables and partials and includes too much. I like Hammer so much I moved from LESS to Sass because of it. If you’re a CodeKit user — and many are — you can get some of Hammer’s functionality in that too. I haven’t had the need to try CodeKit and The Kit Language myself yet, so I’d be keen to know if you have and what you think? Let me know on Twitter @malarkey.

Following on from Three clever people talk about CSS layout, here’s more from Zoe Mickley Gillenwater on Flexbox including a handing comparison between the current specification (2012) and the 2011 syntax implemented sadly by Internet Explorer 10.

This year’s An Event Apart in Atlanta (the first of 2013) looks to have been filled with fantastic new talks. So much so that I’m considering attending one show this year. Once again, Luke does the web a great service by taking notes from the talks. I’d love to hear this one, from Josh Clark, in person.

I sometimes struggle with creating colour schemes, so this is exactly what I need. Using it on a touch device is fun, or on the desktop try hacking the URL if you have a starting colour in mind and carry on from there. Just replace the hex value with your starting colour, color.hailpixel.com/#fa52a6, ( via )

Not since the turn of the century, when we largely shifted from using CSS positioning to floats, has CSS layout been so interesting. Here are three great reads from just today that are all worth your time: Strong Layout Systems by Eric Meyer Jeremy is at An Event Apart in Atlanta, and reports on Eric Meyer’s new talk, Strong Layout Systems in which Eric speaks about flexbox and grids, both new CSS modules that were created specifically to allow us to create layouts. Using Flexbox: Mixing Old and New for the Best Browser Support Chris Coyer Coyier (who deserves a medal for the work he does (and his name spelling correctly, sorry) ) weaves together old and new flexbox syntaxes for better browser support. Anything lower than or equal to Internet Explorer 9 is still tricky though, so you’ll still need to get handy at designing around that problem. CSS3 Layout presentation at In Control Orlando Back at a conference, this time in Orlando, Zoe Mickley Gillenwater also spoke about CSS layout techniques including Grid Layout and Flexible Box Layout. Her slides are available on Slideshare, then check out her post as it’s full of examples and resources. PS: If you can remember either The Noodle Incident or Position Is Everything, it’s past your bedtime.

In this week’s episode of Unfinished Business, Anna and I talk about how to get work and how we both found our first clients. Anna gets annoyed about revenge sites and I tell, for the first time, how I lost my business and restarted Stuff and Nonsense from nothing again in 2006.