Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. My design this week was inspired by American modernist graphic designer, Lester Beall.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. My design this week was inspired by Max Huber. Huber taught graphic design in the Swiss town of Lugano, which coincidentally is where I stay when I go to work in Switzerland. He died in Mendrisio—where my Swiss office is—in 1992.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. My design this week was inspired by Alvin Lustig. Lustig’s work as a book, graphic, and typeface designer has been influential long after his death in 1955.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. My design this week was inspired by Bradbury Thompson. Although less well-known than many of his contemporaries, Bradbury Thompson has been called “one of the giants of 20th-century graphic design.”

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. My design this week was inspired by Alexey Brodovitch. You can read more about him and his work in my article for Smashing Magazine.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. My design this week was inspired by “the pioneering female art director you’ve never heard of,” Bea Feitler.

Throughout 2020, I’ve committed to designing 52 designs for a series of Inspired Design Decisions. My design this week was inspired by graphic designer and typographer Herb Lubalin.

For the past six months, I’ve been designing, writing, and presenting a series of Inspired Design Decisions articles and webinars for Smashing Magazine. These have been brilliantly well received and I wanted a regular project to experiment with new designs.

Back in 2005, my friend Drew started a Christmas advent calendar website and asked me if I’d write something for it. Of course, I agreed, and my first 24ways article was “Z’s not dead baby, Z’s not dead.” It was a short piece how z-index and positioning in CSS could “be used to create designs which ‘break out of the box.’ This year, I returned that topic in what will be my fifteenth and final article for 24ways.

While developing prototype designs for a French football magazine, I came across a strange bug when Chrome’s translate feature comes into contact with CSS generated content.

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.

Last year, Rachel Andrew wrote an article that took a new look at CSS Shapes in which she reintroduced readers to the basics of using CSS Shapes. In a new tutorial for Smashing Magazine, I expand on the topic of Art Direction for the Web with CSS Shapes to create exciting and inspired new design ideas.

It’s 20 years to the day since my wife, and I started Stuff & Nonsense, our little studio and my outlet for creative ideas on the web. Over on 24ways, it’s also my fourteenth article, this time how to Design your site like it’s 1998. It’s a tongue-in-cheek look back at how we developed websites when I started my company, complete with not so old favourites like font elements, frames, layout tables, and spacer gifs.

If, on the off chance:

• You’re reading this entry using Safari Technology Preview 68, and
• You’ve already upgraded your MacOS to Mojave 10.14, and
• You’ve selected Dark appearance in System Preferences

You’ll have noticed that I’ve implemented a brand new dark mode version of my website.

Here’s a quick entry about something I learned just this week about :not() pseudo-class selectors and how to combine them.

It’s been a while since I’ve written seriously, but since I started working on my new ‘Art directing for the web’ book, I’ve got the bug. So when Smashing Magazine asked me to write for them again, I couldn’t resist. My latest article, on ‘Art Directing For The Web With CSS Grid Template Areas’ was published today and I’m very pleased with how it turned out. You can read it here.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to share some of the things that I’ve learned while designing and developing Inspired Guides, starting today with using HTML entities as separators in breadcrumb navigation.

In all my travels I’ve not yet been to Berlin. That’s changing in November when I’ll be appearing at the fabulous beyond tellerrand.

I’ve wanted to meet Zoe Gillenwater for years and have just watched her at Smashing Conference in Oxford give the best presentation of the conference on flexbox progressive enhancement.

Her message was, you may not use Flexbox for whole page layout due to legacy browser issues, but there’s no reason not to use it for enhancing interface elements. She’s followed that up with links and resources. I’m going to have a hard time following that at my workshop tomorrow.

The Guardian’s Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent recently wrote about their struggles and strategy for dealing with Internet Explorer 8. People visiting my site using Internet Explorer 8 are few and far between these days, but those that do could be good customers, so with our redesign I wanted to make a real effort to give them a good experience.

Apple doesn’t have what many of us would consider to be a fully responsive website, but that doesn’t mean they don’t sometimes use two of Ethan’s ingredients; flexible media and CSS3 media queries, to improve the placement of some elements on an otherwise fixed page.

Exactly ten years ago today, on October 20th 2003, A List Apart published Doug Bowman’s Sliding Doors of CSS.

I sometimes work with other designers helping them to translate their design atmosphere and wide screen layouts into responsive designs. Breaking down their designs into systems is big part of what I do. In practical terms that means working through what are sometimes dozens of static visuals to identify patterns of typography, use of colour and layouts, both smaller modules and whole page compositions. From these patterns I classify and identify elements and compose stylesheets based on them.