Clarify what’s expected on both sides to help build great relationships between you and your clients. Contract Killer is plain and simple and there’s no legal jargon. It’s customisable to suit your business and has been used on countless web projects since 2008.
I wanted a simple set of layout modules I could call on for design projects, so I developed my own. I call them Layout Love and rather than keep them to myself, I’m offering them to everyone to use which I hope will encourage people to make layouts which are more interesting.
I wrote my first book, Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web design, way back in 2006. It became a success and since then I’ve had countless people tell me it was influential in their careers. Transcending CSS Revisited is available to read online for free, with a new foreword by Rachel Andrew.
A weekly series of 52 website designs, influenced by inspiring art directors and graphic designers. Learn about the background to each design, the techniques and technologies used to implement it, and how it might inspire more compelling, creative design for the web.
It took much, much longer to produce, and is itself much, much longer than I’d planned, but my fourth book, Art Direction for the Web was published by my friends at Smashing Magazine. Here’s the story behind how it happened.
Updated: General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) templates can cost hundreds of Pounds, so I thought I’d turn my hand to writing a GDPR data protection and privacy policy in the spirit of my Contract Killer. This GDPR template is available to buy.
Sue gets up earlier than I do. Every morning she leaves me in bed, walks down the stairs and towards our kitchen, and opens curtains along the way without thinking. That morning, a beautiful bright blue and green peacock stared back at her through our dining room window.
I bought a four-pack of Apple’s new AirTags, two for me and one each for the family. To make them more useful, I needed ways to attach them to my keys and backpack. I think AirTags themselves are reasonably priced, but Apple’s own-brand accessories definitely aren’t.
One of my biggest problems with grids included with frameworks is that they offer little or no help in deciding proportional relationships between elements. Ratios can be an enormous help in determining these relationships, but they’re rarely written about in relation to web design. I want to change that.
I’m not a framework user. I’ve never once used Bootstrap and I didn’t use 960gs or Blueprint before that. I can understand the benefits of using a framework or off-the-shelf templates, but they weren’t ever for me. Still, I wanted a simple set of layout modules I could call on for design projects, so I developed my own. I call them Layout Love.
Let’s face it, unless you develop a complex product—and even if you do—you probably don’t need half the humungous hunk of CSS you bung at a browser. In fact, it’s possible you only need one default and one alternative style for every element.
For 35 weeks every year—three weeks per month—I work with Nozomi Networks guiding the creative direction and experience design of their cyber security products. The team is growing, so we’re looking for a product designer to join us.
As I’ve said plenty of times before, a well-chosen grid can do much, much more than align content. Our choice of grid can influence how we approach a design and it can change how we think about layout. That’s especially true of modular grids.
Sam Sycamore tweeted a utility class for breaking an element out of its container to fill the full width of a page. It prompted me to think about how and when to use utility classes.
Compound grids offer exciting and often unconventional layout possibilities. Most importantly, they also encourage us to think differently about the choices we make when we’re designing layouts. If you’re familiar with the grid made ubiquitous by Bootstrap, a 3+4 compound grid is a great place to start learning about compound grids.
I’ve said over and over again that a well-chosen grid can do much, much more than align content. The choice of grid can influence how we approach a design, it can change how we think.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been specifying different colours for hyperlinks and their :hover pseudo-classes. Recently, I’ve been experimenting with CSS filters and found they make development much easier.
Although I don’t get to do it as often as I’d like, I enjoy working with startups. So, I was thrilled to be asked to work on a website design for Worrysome, a new business which aims to take the worry out of worrying.
Rooting around in boxes in our storage unit, I came across the Nintendo Game Boy I bought new in 1990. The plastic covering the green LCD was missing, but it was otherwise intact. The box even contained a few game cartridges. I popped it in my pocket and took it home.
When I was developing the SVG panel for principles on the Stuff & Nonsense about page, I ran into a problem which could only be fixed using <foreignObject>.
A generation of product and website designers has grown up with 12 or 16 column grids from Bootstrap-style frameworks. In those frameworks, columns are used mostly for aligning content. In my new design for Stuff & Nonsense, I wanted to go beyond that and use a compound grid to influence the entire design.
Given that SVG makes it possible to create cool compositions of images and text, I’m surprised I rarely see designers and developers using it for more than just icons.
Late last year, I sat down for an hour with Steve Folland to talk about “blagging and learning” on the Being Freelance podcast. The episode’s now available and, to be honest, it’s the best podcast interview I’ve done for a long while.
David King was a British writer, designer and historian of graphic design. He devoted his career to uncovering and chronicling the art of the Soviet and the Constructivist periods, developing posters and graphics for many political groups.
Milton Glaser was born in 1929 in The Bronx, New York City and throughout his career, he personally designed and illustrated more than 400 posters including a famous psychedelic poster of Bob Dylan.
In a career which spanned over 40 years, Saul Bass not only designed some of America’s most iconic logos, but also designed title sequences and film posters for some of Hollywood’s best filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese. For Hitchcock, Bass created innovative title sequences for films including North by Northwest, Psycho, and Vertigo. The opening sequence of Mad Men—one of my favourite TV shows—pays homage to Bass who died in 1996 aged 75.
Paula Scher is an American graphic designer, painter and educator and the first female principal at design firm Pentagram. She is well-known for her distinctive typographic style.
David King was a British writer, designer and historian of graphic design. He devoted his career to uncovering and chronicling the art of the Soviet and the Constructivist periods, developing posters and graphics for many political groups.
Hello. I’m Andy Clarke, a well-known website designer and writer on art direction and design for products and websites. I help businesses to deliver engaging customer experiences and unique designs.