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.

With modern CSS properties including Grid, Flexbox, Multi-column, and Shapes, designers have countless opportunities to make diverse, and engaging designs. Sadly, many of us haven’t had the memo which gives us permission to make more interesting work, so I decided to write that memo. Feel free to modify the message for your company or organisation and of course, circulate it to the designers on your team.

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.

I’ve written plenty of times before about how important it can be to look offline for inspiration to improve the things we make online. Last year, a few friends and I met in London for an inspiring visit to the Photographers Gallery.

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.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working with Equfund, refreshing their visual identity, redesigning their website, and developing a consistent brand experience for customers across different channels and touch-points.

One of my earliest blog entries, all the way back in May 2004, was about a favourite technique for creating colour palettes. It was a technique which I’d used for years, even then. Now I have a new take on creating colour palettes, it’s time to revisit that topic.

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.

Looking back, I’ve redesigned this website roughly every three years. Today I’m proud to show you the new Stuff & Nonsense.

Back in January I wrote about why I believe that style guides and component/pattern libraries should be beautiful as well as functional. That to be effective, they must cater for the different needs of creative and technical people by inspiring as well as informing.

While I’m finalising the table of contents for my ‘shot,’ I’ve been thinking about the things that I regularly do when I’m ‘Designing with a Browser’, one of which is using the contenteditable attribute in the templates that I share with clients.

I can’t quite believe that it’s been almost two years since we launched the previous, Go, go, go, rillas! design of the Stuff & Nonsense website. Today, I’m very pleased to present our next design, ‘It’s the taste.’

It’s amazing to think that John Allsopp’s oft-quoted article, A Dao of Web Design was published fifteen years ago today. A List Apart asked me what John’s article means to me now, but rather than focus on Dao’s flexible design principles, I wanted to talk about a passage that never seems to get a mention.

Our friends at Code Enigma relaunched their website at DrupalCon in Amsterdam. The launch included the branding we designed for them.

Over the last few months, we’ve been working with a client on the design of a mobile analytics ‘web app.’ I’ll show more of it when we add it to our portfolio, but because lately one or two people have asked me about how we choose colour palettes, I thought I’d share how we came up with the colours for the Elemez app.

I’m a Fireworks man.

Spoiler alert: I’m discussing a theme from the first half of the latest series of Mad Men, season 7, but I don’t mention what happens to major characters.

Towards the end of the 1960s, technology had begun to creep into advertising and in ’68, Mad Men’s Sterling Cooper and Partners agency (SC&P) install their first computer, a room-filling, low-humming IBM System/360.

Last week, Cennydd Bowles wrote his Letter to a Junior Designer. It was widely shared and commented on, but while I enjoyed Cennydd sharing his experience—he is, after-all, an experienced product designer—I felt that his message and tone were profoundly negative.

Jeffrey Zeldman on Evolving Responsive Web Design:

Some commenters want to use initial-capped Responsive Web Design to mean responsive design as Ethan first defined it, and lowercase responsive design to mean an amorphous matrix of exciting and evolving design thinking. Lyza says soon we’ll stop saying Responsive altogether, a conclusion Andy Clarke reached three years ago.

Jeremy Keith got a little hardboiled yesterday. I particularly like this paragraph that echoes everything I’ve been saying for years about setting wrong expectations:

Loz Gray reflects on his eighteen-months working with the Guardian on their responsive site. There is so much experience here to learn from.