Blogging and all that malarkey

I’m busy working on the slide deck and example site files for our Advanced CSS Styling workshops in Birmingham, Newcastle (and Tokyo). I’m really excited about this new workshop format and wanted to share one of the example site pages.

Today I’m reviewing the final edit of my Designing With CSS DVD. I couldn’t resist sharing the end credits and gag reel.

The Carsonified roadies have loaded their white Transit and braved the ferry across the sea to Northern Ireland. This week I’m joining the Future Of Web Design Tour in Belfast, presenting “How to Design in the Browser”. More on that later. But first, a one-hour workshop, “Extreme Makeover, Typography Edition”

It’s here — months in the planning and weeks in the making — the new Stuff and Nonsense. The new design is a continuation of my efforts to blend professional and personal styles into a brand that is as much about my personality and interests as it is about our work.

Typedia, a community website to classify typefaces and educate people about them. — From the head of Jason Santa Maria.

What can I say? How chuffed am I? Chuffed to little mint balls, that’s how much. Why? Because I am excited to announce that everyone who registers for a For A Beautiful Web master-class will receive a one-year Typekit Portfolio subscription, courtesy of our friends at Small Batch.

Lessn is an extremely simple, personal url shortener written in PHP with MySQL. — I implemented Lessn on my own short URL in less than a minute.

I’m back from two-weeks hard-earned holiday in the south of France. What have I missed? Over five-hundred unread RSS posts for starters. I’m not usually one for best of entries, but here, in no particular order, are some things that have caught my attention — too many for a deluge of elsewhere entries.

It’s a secret I need keep no longer — we’re taking For A Beautiful Web to Japan in partnership with our friends at Web Directions.

Typotheque is an independent type foundry based in the Netherlands who offer fonts for PC and Macintosh. They have kindly invited me into the beta program of their new @font-face embedding service.

If you’re planning to attend, or thinking about attending, one of our Advanced CSS Styling workshops in either Birmingham on September 25th 2009 or Newcastle Upon Tyne on October 30th 2009, here is the schedule for the event workshop to whet your appetite.

With all the buzz around @font-face delivery services such as Typekit, one question remains to be properly answered. How can web designers show concept work to their clients when the fonts they want to use are hosted (and protected)?

I’ve been slowly evolving the design of For A Beautiful Web over the last few months since I relaunched it in April. Back then I stripped it back from its almost universally unpopular first design, then added hints of a future direction on the home page. Now that design has matured and today I launched its sister site at Transcending CSS.

We had such a great time presenting our master-classes in London last year and in Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney, we decided to host more. ‘Advanced CSS Styling’ will be a one-day workshop in Birmingham on September 25th 2009 and Newcastle Upon Tyne on October 30th 2009. Ten early-bird tickets are available per event at only £275.00+VAT per person, but get in quick, these are sure to be snapped up quickly.

Something tells me I’m going to do a lot of shopping on this site. I already have a use for Adelle.

This morning my inbox popped with an invitation to the preview of Typekit, a technology platform that hosts both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM. Back in May I wrote that Typekit will change everything, here are my first impressions of Typekit in action at For A Beautiful Web.

Joe Drew, one of the people on Mozilla’s graphics team has responded to my comment on First Impressions on Typekit; Studying type rendering closely also calls into question the natural differences between the ways that browsers render type as I discussed in Walls Come Tumbling Down. Safari’s text rendering is clearly more refined and superior to Firefox 3.5.

Royalty-free vector icons, glyphs and symbols based on the Helvetica Bold typeface.

Have you ever wanted to do if-statements in your CSS for the availability of cool features like border-radius? Well, with Modernizr you can accomplish just that! — Now this is promising. I will be testing and writing about Modernizr later this week. Also, read Proudly Announcing: Modernizr by Faruk Ate?.

html5doctor is a collaboration between, Rich Clark, Bruce Lawson, Jack Osborne, Mike Robinson, Remy Sharp and Tom Leadbetter. — I learned something in the first five minutes, good stuff.

It’s been one helluva busy, tiring but inspiring week, traveling first to speak at An Event Apart Boston, then, with Jeremy Keith and Jason Santa Maria onto London for @media2009. At both events, I presented Walls Come Tumbling Down. Here are the presentation slides and transcript.

It’s been ten days since I uploaded the last batch of New Internationalist design files. Since then the team at New Internationalist have had time to live with the templates and make a small number of suggestions and requests that I have implemented over the last couple of days.

Smashing Magazine published an excellent primer for CSS3 properties by Inayaili de Leon today which referenced a little of my work. I was pleased, but as today as gone on and I’ve watched the comments roll, my heart started to sink.

As true now as it was in 1986.