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Stuff & Nonsense product and website design

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Can you catch ’em all?

There’s a different outlaw to capture on every page.

Typography

Updates to my Toon Text styles gallery and generator

I mentioned last week that as well as expanding my Toon Text styles gallery, I’d added a Toon Text generator to help me (and you) create text in the style of those classic cartoon title cards. Now, I’ve launched a major update to both.

Splinter.js — I made a more accessible text splitting tool

Sometimes I don’t want to style a whole word or heading. I want to style individual letters—to nudge a character into place, give one glyph extra weight, or animate a few letters independently. Sadly, some splitting solutions don’t deliver an always accessible result. With the help of a developer pal, I've written my own text splitter, Splinter.js.

I made a tool to generate Toon Text

Partway through writing an upcoming article for Smashing Magazine, I decided it would be helpful to have a tool to generate text styled like that in my beloved cartoon titles. So I made one.

Quick typography tips №2

Here’s a quick design tip for making headlines more interesting using text-decoration.

Quick typography tips №1

Here’s a quick design tip for improving the readability and style of long passages of running text.

A quick shot of gradient text and text-shadow

While I was researching typefaces for a new project, I came across Dalton Maag’s case study for Universal TV. The type is beautiful, of course, but it was their graphics which got my attention.

Typekit: Kerning on the Web

A nice run-down of typography kerning and the font-feature-settings property in CSS. Ignore the irony of the poorly kerned ‘Web’ in Typekit’s title.

If only I knew then what I know now

Coming back to a site made a while ago, it can be common to scratch your head and wonder how (and why) you made certain decisions. Coming back to a site that you made six years ago can be enough to make you break down and sob like a little girl.

Mac for Oz

As Eric was saying earlier, I too am more concerned about the prospect of trusting my trusty Mac to a cargo hold than I am about having my plane blown from the sky (if you believe any of that stuff anyway).

Black and white: Day four

I love comic books (you might have guessed that already), not just because of the stories or the artwork (or because I long to wear a cape and jump off the wardrobe), but because I admire the’process’ and teamwork which goes into creating them.

The weakest link

I don’t want to tread on Dan’s or his Simple Quiz toes, but… I’ve been trying recently to better optimise my CSS, and this has lead me to wonder where certain rules are best arranged. So with that, and with this example of a navigation list in mind.

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Andy Clarke. Web design pioneer

Andy Clarke

I’m Andy Clarke, a product and website designer. My work blends art direction, branding, and editorial to help people improve their products and websites. I’ve written books about website design, given talks, and delivered design workshops worldwide.