Blogging and all that malarkey

I’m currently writing a hardboiled web design book about Art Directing for the Web, so in this season of the Unfinished Business podcast I’m discussing art directing with my guests who are some of the most experienced art directors and designers working on the web today. This week I talk about art direction Stephen Hay.

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect on May 25th 2018 and web designers and our clients need to be prepared. This open source GDPR privacy policy template is designed for web professionals.

I’m currently writing a hardboiled web design book about Art Directing for the Web, so in this season of the Unfinished Business podcast I’m discussing art directing with my guests who are some of the most experienced art directors and designers working on the web today. This week I talk about art direction with ProPublica Design Director, David Sleight.

I’m currently writing a hardboiled web design book about Art Directing for the Web, so in this season of the Unfinished Business podcast I’m discussing art directing with my guests who are some of the most experienced art directors and designers working on the web today. This week I talk about art direction and CSS Grid with Rachel Andrew.

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.

I’m currently writing a hardboiled web design book about Art Directing for the Web, so in this season of the Unfinished Business podcast I’m discussing art directing with my guests who are some of the most experienced art directors and designers working on the web today. This week I talk about art direction with Super Friendly, Dan Mall.

I’m currently writing a hardboiled web design book about Art Directing for the Web, so in this new season of the Unfinished Business podcast I’m be discussing art directing with my guests who are some of the most experienced art directors and designers working on the web today. This week I talk about art direction with former creative director at The Guardian, Mark Porter.

Welcome to this new season of the Unfinished Business podcast. Over the next few weeks and months, I’ll be discussing art directing for web with my guests, some of the most experienced art directors and designers working on the web today.

Everyone loved stickers, right? And t-shirts? Right again. And gorillas? Of course you do, especially Errol. Now you can stick Errol stickers on the things you stick stickers on and proudly wear Errol on your chest. (Chest beating optional.)

One of the reasons for my redesigning this website was to make it more appropriate for the work I’ve been making most recently, but also as an opportunity for it to better reflect me as a person. A big part of that was the writing that I did in what I think of as my blogging ‘heyday.’

Speaking at conferences has been one of the best things that I’ve done over the past decade plus some. Not just the standing on stage doing the talking part, and the traveling to fabulous places (and Scarborough) part, but the coming up with stories to tell and lessons to teach part too.

A few weeks ago I was writing content for my speaking information for conference organisers page and I wondered about other speakers’ ‘terms of business’ and how much—if anything—they charged. To get a feeling for how people approach the business of speaking, I set up a quick survey.

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.

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.

I gave a new talk on designing inspired style guides last week at Design Exchange Nottingham. It was a really good night, a fabulous audience which was double their normal attendance and I also got the chance to sink a few drinks with my old friend Harry. It’s very likely that I won’t give this talk again in Europe this year, and I wanted to share it with more people, so I’ve written a transcript to accompany the slides.

NB: This page contains 8Mb of images. I’ve optimised them as much as possible, but you probably don’t want to load this page using your mobile data plan.

On a change from the usual date–for the past eight years I’ve been published on 23rd December—I’m back on 24 ways again this year with a new article about Designing Imaginative Style Guides.

Starting today, Geek Mental Help Week is a week-long series of articles, blog posts, conversations, podcasts and events across the web about mental health issues, how to help people who suffer, and those who care for us.

It’s been a question that I’ve been asked a lot over the past couple of weeks in the run up to this year’s Geek Mental Help Week, so I thought that I’d explain in more than Twitter’s 140 characters.

Geek Mental Help Week starts next Monday and I’m very happy to say that there are several events happening during the week.

Flights are booked and visas are in hand^* and I’m getting very excited, because in only a few weeks, Sue and I are heading back to Australia to join Espen, Jina and Una, as well as our friends in Perth at the very first Mixin conference.

Do you know where you were or what you were doing exactly ten years ago (next week?) I do. I was speaking at my first, in fact the first Web Directions conference in Sydney, Australia. (I gave a talk called ‘Creating Inspired Design’ and there’s audio of it if you’re interested in listening.)