Blogging and all that Malarkey

If you attended An Event Apart in either Chicago or New Orleans, or @media in London this year, you might have seen Underpants Over My Trousers, my talk about how comic book design conventions and principles can influence web page design.

I was lucky to be sent a preview copy of Rachel Andrew ‘s soon-to-be-published book Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong!, published by those nice chaps at SitePoint. I’ll be writing a full review later this week, but as the book is largely (almost exclusively) devoted to CSS display: table; properties, I couldn’t wait to try out some of the techniques she advocates.

It's lovely to come home and find something nice waiting for you, isn't it? A nice cup of freshly brewed tea is lovely (nicer with biscuits, but not so common). So is a nice piece of ginger cake with lemon icing. A smiley lady is nice too. I got all three today (which was lovely), but what made it lovelier was a copy of Jon Burgerman's retrospective book of his illustrations, Pens Are My Friends.

I am really, really pleased that places on our Visual Web Design Master Class are selling fast. Book your place before 10th October 2008 and you could win a copy of Inspired Design (DVD) and Transcending CSS (book), together worth £68.00*.

Web designs need not look exactly the same in all browsers. I know that’s a topic I have written about and spoken on a fair amount before, but somehow I’m always amazed by the reactions that I get when the subject comes up.

Demonstrating our designs to clients as XHTML/CSS pages rather than as static Photoshop or Fireworks has streamlined our workflow and helped us to set and manage a client’s expectations better than ever before.

Having spoken at almost twenty major conferences in the last few years, I've picked up a fair selection of schwag items and giveaways. Now that we are busy organizing our first For A Beautiful Web events, I'd love to know what the best shwag items you've received are.

Back in April, I was booked by Carsonified to present a half-day workshop on Microformats as part of their Future Of Web Design London spectacular. So what have Microformats got to do with death rays?

Want an easier way to re-style and optimize your pages to work better in Safari Touch (or Mobile Safari if you prefer) on the iPhone or iPod Touch? I did and now with a custom version of Allan Jardine ‘s Conditional-CSS I have it. And you do too.

When I set out to design the site to launch For A Beautiful Web I knew that I wanted to set a new tone and arrive at something a little unexpected. One of the ways that (I hope) I have achieved that level of unexpectedness was to turn to a classically trained artist, rather than a web designer for creative direction.