Blogging and all that malarkey

This week on Unfinished Business, I’m joined by James Young to talk about his recent, first conference presentations and why confidence in front of people is as important as a designer’s skills with Photoshop. We discuss his knives business and how a side business can improve the work we do on the web and give us more varied content to talk and write about.

While we’re on the subject of unexpected conference talks, I’m stepping in to fill Sarah Parmenter’s high heeled shoes at Handheld Conference this month as Sarah’s had to unfortunately cancel.

I can’t quite believe I just wrote that, I’m pinching myself to make sure it’s still true. And it is. Next February, we’ll be heading out to Georgia again where I’m speaking once again at An Event Apart in Atlanta.

On this week’s Unfinished Business, regular co-host Laura Kalbag and I talked candidly about hosting workshops and whether they make commercial sense and how we make money from them. Laura asked me about choosing Stuff and Nonsense for our business name and we talked about how people can make the best, first impression when you write to us. (Sorry for Laura’s audio quality. We’ll try to do better next time.)

Yep. Number forty-one of one-hundred. To be honest, when I was told about being part of the Drum Digerati list I wasn’t at all happy about it.

This week on Unfinished Business, I’m joined by CSS hero Harry Roberts to talk about being typecast (literally,) going Keynote commando and Harry’s first week on the dole. We talk about how people can improve the way they think about sending and dealing with email and why we’re both obsessed with the backends of vans.

Bob Asbille asked me this week if my Hardboiled Web Design book is worth buying by someone who’s looking to learn about responsive web design.

This week, I’m joined by fabulous designer Veerle Pieters to talk about whether cycling or eating toasties is the best exercise, when working on retainer for long-term projects makes sense and the right questions to ask in our customer enquiry questionnaires.

Today I’m over in Oslo, Norway, giving a talk at Accessibility Day 2013 (Google translated link). My topic is “Designing an atmosphere of accessibility” and I cover how I think focussing on content first as part of responsive design, and in particular working on design ‘atmosphere’ (typography, colour and texture) helps better, more accessible design.

My slides for the talk are already available on SpeakerDeck, but of course, you really had to be here.

Smashing Magazine are hosting a series of one day workshops across Europe throughout November and December.

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

On Unfinished Business this week, Designer and author of A Pocket Guide to CSS Animations Val Head joins me to talk about practical uses for CSS animations, how small publishers have made publishing books more accessible to first time authors and, of course, The Sooty Show.

Getting excited yet?

With the 50th anniversary episode and the Day Of The Doctor just over a month away, I am. I’m also looking forward to the Unfinished Business Doctor Who Special with Jon HIcks too. We’re recording that the day after the Day and publishing it the day after that.

2012’s Smashing Conference in Freiburg had the best atmosphere of any European conference I’ve been to and, while I wasn’t there, I hear this year’s was pretty special too.

This week, illustrator Josh Cleland joins me to talk about how far we can go using a movie or TV character’s likeness, the differences between an illustrator’s and a web designer’s contract and Josh’s “100% satisfaction guarantee.”

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.

It was lovely to hear Laura Kalbag talk about accessibility at Revolution in Shrewsbury a week or more ago. Especially as I’ll be doing the same in Oslo in a couple of weeks. I’m returning to conference speaking at Accessibility Day 2013 (Google translated link) run by those fine people at Northern Beat. My topic is “Designing an atmosphere of accessibility” and I’ll cover how I think focussing on content first as part of responsive design, and in particular working on design ‘atmosphere’ (typography, colour and texture) helps accessible design.

Then the following day (gulp) I’ll be in Scarborough at #TIDE 2013. I’m looking forward to this event enormously as I finally get to meet my CSS hero Harry Roberts and see a few old friends there too. I’ll be talking about “How to call your client an idiot without getting fired” (no guarantees) which is a lot more serious than it sounds as it’s all about encouraging better client participation in design projects. I’ve given this talk once before and this time, like the last, there’ll be no slides, just me.

It’s been a while and I’m justifiably nervous about both talks for different reasons, but it’ll feel good to be back.

In this week’s show, Alex’s friend Brad Frost, who having survived his trip to Brighton, returns to talk to me about designing ‘in the open’ and what the benefits for us and the people and organisations we’re working for can be.

Listen now

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.

In this week’s episode, designer and co-host of ‘that other podcast’ Liz Elcoate joins me to talk about the difficulties of working alone for long periods, the difficulties of keeping your portfolio full of new work when you work under non-disclosure agreements and why we should never apologise for working with small businesses with smaller budgets.

Listen now

Special guest Dan Cederholm joins me on Unfinished Business this week to talk about making money by making things, how making great schwag makes a great impression and what happened to Foamee. We discuss why on Dribbble it’s important for business to not get in the way of a great service and with Dan’s new book coming up, we talk about the process of writing and whether second editions are worth it.

Talking to Dan Cederholm on Unfinished Business this coming week, our conversation to book writing, in particular working on second, maybe even third editions of books we wrote years ago.

On this week’s show, Designer, icon artist, author and possibly Doctor Who’s next companion Jon Hicks joins yours truly to discuss differences in the ways that Jon approaches different types of clients, how publishing his day rate and availability on his web site has improved the ‘quality’ of his enquiries and who ultimately owns the work that we do. As you might expect we couldn’t spend an hour together without talking about Doctor Who. Quite a lot.

In the latest episode of your favourite soap ‘apera,’ Anna and I go off on a tangent (no really) about the winner of out ‘Daft Proposal Of The Week Award.’ We talk about how to respond to proposals and whether it’s ever appropriate to not respond at all.