Blogging and all that malarkey

Back from my holidays, all tanned and gorgeous (obviously,) I rejoined Anna to talk about Laura Kalbag’s ‘Good Designers, Good Clients’ article on A List Apart. We discuss how I was inspired by Seth Godin to start speaking again and the best bits from the last three episodes including our ‘double our day rate Fridays,’ Sarah’s approach to handling low budget enquiries and the problem of doing work under NDA and having little to show for it in your portfolio.

My friend Sarah Parmenter co-hosted this week’s show with Anna while I was driving back from holiday. This week’s topics are money related — Sarah and Anna talk about fair pricing, taking payment before site launch and educating clients with unreasonably low budgets. Anna also asks Sarah about her new venture and what drove her to start a completely different business. They discuss the importance of honesty and how working on side projects can help with motivation.

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.

I cannot pass up this opportunity to link to this week’s fabulous Happy Monday interview with Seth Godin.

I’m generally bored of interview shows, that’s why we have guest co-hosts instead of guests and this week on Unfinished Business, my CSS hero Harry Roberts steps in while I’m on holiday. Anna asks him about his sudden decision to leave his full-time job, the events that led up to it, and what he plans to do next. Harry shares his advice for people struggling to balance work and personal projects. They also have a sneaky chat about object oriented CSS at the end even though it’s not really business related but something had to replace the usual ten minutes of banter about soap and apes.

It seemed apt to post these lyrics today. My person favourite version of this song is on Billy Bragg’s Tooth & Nail album. Listen on Spotify.

In the final chapter of the contract episode trilogy, Anna asks me about writing a contract for working with agencies, we discuss which browsers and devices we should mention, termination fees, and who owns the content at the end of the project.

It’s episode 29 of Unfinished Business and part two in a series about contracts and the Contract Killer. Anna and I talk about how a good contract sets the tone and lays the foundations for a mutually good business relationship. We get down to the nitty gritty of the first few Contract Killer clauses including specifying deliverables, price and payment terms.

Oh. And I mentioned ze Chermans but I think I got avay viz it.

Matt Stow has been documented device viewport sizes and the result is a handy, searchable reference of platforms and device dimensions. If you have a device that’s not listed, you can check it’s sizes and add it here.

Finally, yes finally, Anna and I get around to the first of two, maybe three, episodes about contacts. We talk about the ‘Contract Killer,’ why we think it’s important to always use a contract and why some people think otherwise. We discuss the essential elements that should go into every contract and why, on top of any legal benefits, how a good contract says a lot about how you do business and why writing yours should be a creative challenge you should relish.

(Don’t miss the gag wheel and ice-cream banter after the show. It’s a scorcher.)

A growing nation of genetically evolved apes led by Caesar is threatened by a band of human survivors of the devastating virus unleashed a decade earlier. They reach a fragile peace, but it proves short-lived, as both sides are brought to the brink of a war that will determine who will emerge as Earth’s dominant species.

That banner says everything that makes The Planet Of The Apes special to me.

Contracts seem to be the topic of this month and I, for one, couldn’t be happier about that. Anna and I are covering contracts in detail over the next two or three episodes of Unfinished Business, starting with episode 28 out on Monday. Not only will we be talking about ‘Contract Killer,’ we’ll be explaining why writing your contract should be a creative activity and how that says a lot about how you do business.

I know it likely won’t ever happen, but if you get fed up of hearing our voices, Contract Killer also got plenty of mentions on that other podcast Liz and Sean’s The Freelance Web podcast this week too in an excellent episode about contracts.

Keith Devon wants to find out how freelance designers and developers handle contracts. So do I, so go spend a minute filling in his survey.

As it stands at the moment, 45% use something like my ‘Contract Killer’ (or the contract itself) and another 9% wrote their own based on it. Although responder numbers are small so far, that’s brilliant. I’m prouder of ‘Contract Killer’ than anything else I’ve ever done.

Keith Devon’s Freelance contract survey

In this week’s episode, Anna and I discuss Motorhead and motorcycles and how I’m too much of a ‘wendy’ to lift one. Really. We talk about how Stuff and Nonsense’s pattern of weekly working sometimes doesn’t work and how to deal with competing client demands when you have limited time available.

In this week’s episode, lycra wearing, tightrope walker* Anna Debenham and I ask “who would win in a fight? Boba Fett or Batman?” “If the world was ending tomorrow, which endangered species would you eat?” and other important business questions. More importantly we talk about reviews and how they can help improve your business.

* We lied about the lycra.

Following up on my M M M Madness post, here are two good links to more on CSS filters:

• Creating iOS 7 effects with CSS3: translucency and transparency

  John Allsopp recreates iOS7’s translucency and blur using CSS filters. I suspect we’ll see a lot more of this design aesthetic on the web in the months to come.

• Create impact with CSS filters video presentation from Alex Danilo

  Alex Danilo’s presentation on CSS filters from Web Directions Code in Australia is well worth your time too.

My prediction? Designers are going to go CSS filter crazy over the next year.

In this, the 25th anniversary episode of Unfinished Business, Anna and I talk about working in a supermarket (a while ago, obviously) and how my professional level skiving almost lead me to a career in supermarket management. We talk about selling an experience as well as selling design or code and how creative services are as much about putting on a show as they are about doing work.

While I was preparing the slides from my full day CSS3 For Responsive Web Design at Smashing Magazine, I got very excited by the new filters in CSS. (313 onwards in my slide deck.) These filters — not to be confused with those legacy, proprietary Microsoft filters — are now well on their way to becoming part of a standard.

I’ve just come back from a trip to beautiful Freiburg in southern Germany where I hosted my new CSS3 For Responsive Web Design workshop at Smashing Magazine. I went to Freiburg last September when Alex and I attended Smashing Conference and we had a brilliant time. The folks at Smashing Magazine were genuinely welcoming and I jumped at the first opportunity to work with them again.

I’ve lived with the new video feature in Instagram for about a week and while I was originally sceptical about whether video and Instagram would be a good match, I thought it best to wait a while before forming an expressing an opinion.

This week, while Anna’s away, I talk to (Alex’s friend) Brad Frost about iOS7, dropping pretzels and chocolate Hobnobs. (Spoiler: Brad had no idea what they are.) In between we talk about speaking and contributing and what you gain by giving away information freely.

In this week’s episode of Unfinished Business, Anna and I talk about me being robbed of my iPhone in Geneva and the implications, both personal and business of what happened. We talk about the importance of ensuring that insurance is up-to-date (spoiler: mine wasn’t) and how to secure your iOS devices and Mac in case of theft.

And here’s what happened:

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”?