Blogging and all that malarkey

Yesterday, something I said on Twitter seems to have resonated. “It takes a court order to get your personal data from Twitter, but just anyone can get it from Facebook.”

It’s been two months since my new book, Hardboiled Web Design, was published by Five Simple Steps and a few weeks since the paperback started arriving on desks and shelves around the world. It’s been incredibly exciting to read how much people love it. Now preparations are in full swing for what comes next, Hardboiled Web Design workshops across the UK.

I’ve always believed that content on the web should be free (from presentation).

My new Macbook Air arrived this evening and it’s the best laptop I’ve ever owned. Less than an hour after unpacking it, it’s already the travelling production powerhouse I wanted.

No it wasn’t a revolutionary new device. It wasn’t even the release of The Beatles music in a lower quality, more expensive format. Oh no, it was much more exciting. Hardboiled Web Design workshop dates in 2011. Yeah! No kidding!

Ahead of an announcement I’ll be making tomorrow (don’t tell anyone, but it’s about Hardboiled Web Design workshops), I decided to make a little fun of myself.

If you didn’t get a chance to catch my Hardboiled Web Design talk at a conference this year, your luck just came in. Those fine chaps at CodeWorx have posted a high quality video of the entire talk. I’ll post a text transcript and slides from the talk later this week.

Back in August I started work on a new design for MobiCart, a new mobile e-commerce platform, designing both the front-of-house site and the back-end admin. It was fun, although it lasted only a few weeks.

I’m tired. Really tired. Not just the tiredness that comes from back-to-back transatlantic flights crammed into airline seats (although I have another one of those to look forward to today), but the kind of tiredness that goes deep into my bones.

After a year in the planning and six months in the making, my new book, Hardboiled Web Design is available to buy from Five Simple Steps

Although writing a book might appear to be a lonely occupation, in reality it’s a team effort. For Hardboiled Web Design I’ve been lucky to work some incredible talent, including cover artist, the one and only Kevin Cornell.

A large part of writing a book about website design, markup and CSS is designing and producing the example files that accompany the book. For Hardboiled Web Design, this meant several months of designing, coding, redesigning, recoding and testing.

Writing and producing a book like Hardboiled Web Design provides a fantastic opportunity to work with other, amazing designers, illustrators or a mixture of the two like Elliot Jay Stocks.

Making layouts responsive using CSS3 Media Queries are a big part of the work that I’m doing for the Hardboiled Web Design site in the run up to the book’s launch.

One of the nicest parts about writing and producing a book like Hardboiled Web Design in partnership with a boutique publisher like Five Simple Steps is having the opportunity to work with other, amazing designers, illustrators and photographers.

After several years of presenting my workshop materials on behalf of other people, on the 1st of September 2008 I announced that I’d be striking out to present my content in my own series of workshop events. I called this aspect of my business For A Beautiful Web.

We just can’t stay off the road. Two years since our last road trip when we drove an RV from Phoenix to Minneapolis, we’re again heading back West and this time we’re Looking for Yogi.

Yesterday, Mike Davidson announced the sweeping redesign of msnbc.com article pages. The redesign is especially brave from a traditional news outlet business perspective as it emphasizes readability and enjoyment over page views. But I do have a minor gripe with its typography and set out to find a solution.

Yesterday Microsoft announced the third Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9. I’ve been using this preview for a while, testing how their newest browser stands up to the examples I’ve designed for Hardboiled Web Design.

At Web Directions @media last week, Mircea Piturca (who attended my Advanced CSS Styling workshop) showed me his latest side-project — TypeFolly — a designing in a browser interface experiment made entirely using jQuery pulling fonts from the Typekit API.

TypeFolly is probably the first web typography tool that allows designers to easily create beautiful “type follies”. The result is a fully html & css3 compliant code. TypeFolly gives designers the freedom to create beautiful type compositions, test new font combinations and fully enjoy the power of CSS3.

An amazing piece of work.

In the comments of many web design group interviews, many readers ask for more beards on the panels in particular because, There is no way of discerning how the experience of a bearded designer might differ, simply because there is a complete lack of representation. So, we decided to prepare an article featuring specifically professional bearded designers giving their expert advice.

Important: Contract Killer has been updated.

If you own anything made by Apple, you possibly already know about Hard Graft. I’ve been a huge fan of them, their cases and sleeves since a friend introduced me to them a year or so ago. So when Apple announced the iPad, I knew I wanted a Hard Graft case for it. Hell, I wanted a Hard Graft iPad case even before there was an iPad. And now I have one.

It seems like months ago (it was) when I handed over my design templates for the redesign of CannyBill. Since then, the canny chaps have been working hard to implement the design and @RellyAB has been working her strange magic on their copy. Yesterday the new CannyBill site went live.