Zeldman in fine form:

Never fear, web design generalists: many companies and organizations require your services and always will — from universities still seeking webmasters, to startups seeking seasoned folks with multiple areas of understanding to direct and coordinate the activities of younger specialists. But if jack-of-all web work is feeling stale, now may be the time to up your game as a graphic designer, or experience designer, or front end developer. “Diversify or die” is overstating things when the world needs generalists, too. But “follow the path you love” will always be good advice.

I know I’ve talked about Ghostlab a lot on Unfinished Business and mentioned it a fair few times on Twitter. This isn’t just because its makers Vanamco have sponsored the show. No, I use Ghostlab almost everyday and it’s really made my designing responsive websites much more convenient.

As Ghostlab is an app for the Mac, often when I tweet about it I see people complaining that it’s not available for Windows. Well quit your whining Windows users, because today Vanamco have launched Ghostlab for Windows!

Ghostlab for Windows has a new interface and is available in both 32 and 64 bit versions. There’s even a free seven day trial and a licence costs just $49 US.

Ghostlab for Windows may be just what you were ho, ho, hoping for.

If you’re reading this in RSS, switch over to a browser, as we just launched ‘Go, go, go, rillas!’ It’s our late 2013 version of Stuff and Nonsense.

Brad Frost:

As multi-device Web design quickly becomes the norm, the throw-it-over-the-fence style of creating websites is going to be increasingly difficult. The modern Web design process requires intense collaboration between designers and front-end developers. Real collaboration and communication are difficult, but we must get over that awkwardness in order to overcome the design/development divide.

His post reminds me a little of my Walls Come Tumbling Down presentation slides and transcript. It is often quite scary how alike our thinking is.

On this week’s Unfinished Business, Alex’s friend Brad Frost and I talked about designing in the open, pro-bono projects for great causes like the Pittsburg Food Bank and the open project he and Melissa are starting for them.

This post is an extract from my chapter in Smashing Book 3, titled ‘Designing Atoms and Elements’ written in March 2012.

Has a client ever said to you:

“I don’t like the design”?

In January 2012, we began creating this solid, yet flexible, foundation that will help Google’s designers and vendors to produce high quality work that helps strengthen Google’s identity. What you see here is a visual summary of the guidelines

A lot of design gold to learn from in Google’s Visual Assets Guidelines. Part two is here. (Via my mate Dan.)

I’m struggling to believe it quite frankly, but The CSS Zen Garden was planted ten years ago today. I don’t think we should underestimate the importance of The CSS Zen Garden in the history of the web. Its influence still resonates today. Now it’s back accepting submissions and making some of us feel very old.

A year ago I travelled to Oslo in Norway to teach a two day responsive design workshop at FINN. The team there have (obviously) been working hard and yesterday they let me know they’d a new responsive design. It looks great

The Stuff and Nonsense nutty boys header is pretty tall and I decided I wanted to reduce its height for small screens, such as phones, in landscape orientation. When I wrote the CSS to make this happen I made some nutty assumptions. In the spirit of sharing our mistakes:

I hope you enjoyed yesterday’s new, Madness-inspired home page header. We certainly enjoyed making it.

I like to think that at Stuff and Nonsense, our house isn’t so much a place to work as it is a house of fun and although we take the work we do very seriously, we don’t take ourselves too seriously at all. We hope that sense of fun comes across on our site and today we’re putting aside our embarrassment, putting on our baggy trousers and unveiling a new header on our home page.

Jordan Moore (who wears rattlesnake skin shoes) on how to give users the option to “Toggle a Responsive Design On and Off”:

Whenever I’m asked what aspects of design developers should learn, I always answer grid ratios and typography. From now on I’ll also point people to this great little slide deck by Dan Barber.

Today’s Squidfingers.

I’d always admired the work of, and the people behind the Web Standards Project. What they had achieved in only a few short years in bringing browser vendors and tool authors together behind open standards was nothing short of magnificent, so when I was asked to join the project on March 31st 2005 it was an ambition fulfilled.

BLOKK is a font for quick mock-ups and wireframing for clients who do not understand latin.

Brilliant! (via)

I sometimes struggle with creating colour schemes, so this is exactly what I need. Using it on a touch device is fun, or on the desktop try hacking the URL if you have a starting colour in mind and carry on from there. Just replace the hex value with your starting colour, color.hailpixel.com/#fa52a6,

(via)

Dan Mall, following up on Brad Frost:

As an industry, we sell websites like paintings. Instead, we should be selling beautiful and easy access to content, agnostic of device, screen size, or context.

Reminds me of:

Worse still are the expectations that static visuals set in the minds of clients, particularly when designers use these visuals as a method to get sign-off for a design. Is the fact that so many web pages are fixed width and centered a direct result of clients signing off fixed width design visuals?

Funny how things come around.

I thoroughly enjoyed hosting another Fashionably flexible responsive web design workshop at New Adventures on Wednesday. I got the feeling that everyone enjoyed the day. I know that I did.

Britain’s first independent television channel, ITV, unveiled both its new logo and a responsive new home page today. I’m a fan of the curvy new logo and how it changes to match a backdrop. The home page is full of thoughtful details too, made all the more interesting to me because my work at STV (the Scottish franchise for ITV) over the last year has tackled many of the same problems.

Two great reads this week, on connected subjects:

Two things about the iPad mini as I’ve owned one since Friday:

You might think — because all the talk at the moment is about seven inch tablets, in particular the iPad mini vs Google’s Nexus 7 vs Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD — that a seven inch tablet was a seven inch tablet was a… Right? Wrong.