Tag: Custom

I’ve written another book! Standout Designs for the Web explores why so many websites look alike and how designers can create something more distinctive. Here’s what inspired it, what’s inside, and when you can get your hands on it.

Sinar saw digital photography coming decades before it transformed the industry. So why did one of photography’s most innovative companies struggle to survive it? I have some ideas.

Militant was a British socialist newspaper associated with the Militant ‘tendency,’ a left-wing political movement whose members were ultimately expelled from the mainstream Labour Party. I looked back at how the Militant masthead logo evolved between 1964 and 1997.

For the past few years, unless a client insists otherwise, Eleventy has been my go-to for building websites. It gives me complete control without the overhead of a traditional CMS. Recently, I’ve pulled everything I’ve learned into my own Eleventy in a Box system for starting projects quickly, and boy-oh-boy, has it saved me a ton of time.

I designed an information-rich website for The Shared Homeland Paradigm, using typography and graphics to clearly and visually explain complex political ideas. Here’s how I approached it.

The Academy of Scoring Arts just launched its new website. It’s a community of arrangers, composers, and musicians that helps industry professionals develop their craft through events and video tutorials.

I designed a website for composer Begoña Pereda using typography and animated SVG graphics to reflect her personality and musical style. Here’s how I approached it.

Although we’ve had a smattering of snow here in the Rhineland—where I’m basing myself for a couple of months—at home, an “arctic blast” means snow is threatening. Last week, I added a snow mode to my websites, but my pioneer characters still looked toasty and warm, and unaffected by the wintery conditions. So, it was time for them to get chilly.

I redesigned my contact page animation as a gold mine scene. Here’s how I approached the artwork, structured the SVG, and added subtle ambient animation using CSS.

While the smart people finish the Academy of Scoring Arts website’s CMS development, I’ve been rummaging through my design files and rediscovered several concepts that didn’t make it into the final design.

When I’ve had a few spare minutes, I’ve been adding to and optimising my Magnificent 7 character animations to improve rendering speed. Then I had the idea to build a silly fairground-style shooting game, and I set myself the challenge of keeping it as small as possible.

I’d been tinkering with animations last week and wondered what else I could do with my Magnificent 7 characters. I love surprising people with hidden Easter Eggs, so I decided to use them in a little hidden game.

Lately, while I’ve been making my Toon Titles and writing about SVG animations, I’ve been pondering where the sweet spot is between CSS and GSAP for animations. This Toon Title, featuring Hanna Barbera’s Quick Draw McGraw in his alter ego El Kabong, illustrates it nicely.

I’ve always loved it when designers take the time to give their blog posts a little extra polish. Jason Santa Maria did this brilliantly on his old site, and my design hero, Trent Walton, made each post feel like a one-off. With my recent code overhaul, I thought—why not do the same?

I’ve brought back my Code ♠︎ Shirts ♠︎ Rock tee designs which bring together, err, code and rock. If you didn’t get Oasis tickets, you’ll definitely, maybe, look like supersonic wearing this outline tee.

After writing yesterday’s blog entry on Re-coding Apple’s Black Friday dates I realised I had missed the bleedin’ obvious solution. That instead of wrangling CSS and HTML, SVG could’ve been the better option.

Most parts of Apple’s website are fabulously flexible. But today, I was browsing for Black Friday deals and found a fixed-width design element which I was determined to make flexible.

The spectacle of yet another Tory leadership campaign—this time to replace Boris Johnson—is in full swing. So, I thought it would be fun to rank the hopefuls’ campaign catchphrases. The results may shock you.

We stopped at a motorway services to buy baguettes for lunch yesterday, on our way down through France. I left my wallet behind and I didn’t notice until we were an hour further down the road.

Over the past month, I’ve been upgrading my Apple TV movie artwork from portrait to 16:9. Like the artwork for many older film series, Apple’s artwork for George A. Romero’s series of zombie films is more walking on sunshine than walking dead. So—like I did for other series in my collection—I decided to make my own artwork.

Rooting around in boxes in our storage unit, I came across the Nintendo Game Boy I bought new in 1990. The plastic covering the green LCD was missing, but it was otherwise intact. The box even contained a few game cartridges. I popped it in my pocket and took it home.