Blogging and all that Malarkey

This year’s been one of my busiest for speaking, teaching and designing for clients. You might not be able to tell that though, because when I deconstructed this site a few months ago, my portfolio was one of the things that didn’t find its way back. I’ll rectify that in the new year, but in the meantime I wanted to share some of the projects I’ve been working on, starting with this — a redesign for ISO, the International Organization for Standardization.

Some quotes from the HP MacBook Pro Envy’s design video (Hat tip to Matt Legend Gemmell ):

I doubt it’ll come as much of a surprise to learn that I love my iPhone 4S. It was a major upgrade from the 3G I swapped my original iPhone for last September, but I’ve been less impressed with its battery life. Now I think I’ve found the culprit. Foursquare

I’ve turned into a country music nut. What a started as downloading Dolly albums for a road trip has turned into real enthusiasm. Although I look terrible in a cowboy hat and don’t know the difference between a’coon dog and a corn dog, lately I’ve listened to little else. We could disagree about what classes as real country — Cough. Taylor Swift — but all I really care about is music I like.

.Net magazine published its The top 25 books for web designers and developers after asking a few contributors and yours truly for our recommendations.

There’s been much written about responsive design, but so much of it has focussed on aspects of technical implementation rather than about the design decisions that responsive design demands. So next February (2012), I’ll be travelling down-under to Australia to host four, yes four, ‘Fashionably flexible responsive web design’ workshops.

I’ve become a bit of a LESS junkie these last few months, so I was chuffed when I heard about CodeKit — a new, (free while in beta) toolkit — by LESS.app developer Bryan Jones. I’ve been trying CodeKit out this week.

About two years ago, I tweeted “If your CSS is complicated enough to need a compiler or pre-processor, you’re fucking doing it wrong!” I meant it too. After-all, CSS isn’t hard to learn and it’s easy to write and write quickly. So why would you need a processor like LESS or Sass?

After pushing my redesign live yesterday, I’ve been asked a few times about why I pulled respond.js (and with it, CSS3 Media Query support for older versions on Internet Explorer) from the new site.

I’ve been wanting to create a new look for Stuff & Nonsense for a good, long while, but I felt daunted by how much work I imagined there’d be for a redesign. My work diary is so full that I couldn’t see the time I thought I needed, so the site stagnated and over the last few months I couldn’t bear to look at it. Then a few weeks ago, Elliot spontaneously redesigned his site and inspired me to follow suit.