Blogging and all that malarkey

I love rock music and I also love writing HTML and CSS code, so what better way to bring my two loves together than a set of shirt designs which celebrate both? Code ♠ Shirts ♠ Rock designs are inspired by classic rock band logos. Wear them at home or at work, to a gig, or your next tech conference. They’re ideal gifts for the code loving rocker, or rock loving coder you know. The shop is now open.

To celebrate the launch of my Code ♠ Shirts ♠ Rock tees tomorrow, here are my top five rock albums of all time.

I love rock music and during the 1980s I saw AC/DC on their Back In Black tour, Girlschool, Iron Maiden (before Bruce Dickinson,) Judas Priest, Saxon, Thin Lizzy, and of course Motorhead with their classic line up of Lemmy, Fast Eddie and Philthy Phil. Motorhead were always my favourite, and when my son was old enough to have his own ear drums damaged, we went to see them together.

It always baffled me that with a name like Smashing Magazine, my friends at Smashing hadn’t published a, errr, magazine. Well, now they have.

I’ve just finished my third (in my series of 12) Inspired Design Decisions webinars for Smashing Magazine. This month, I spoke about how to combine consistency with variety to create a consistent experience of a design across an entire product, publication, or website.

While developing prototype designs for a French football magazine, I came across a strange bug when Chrome’s translate feature comes into contact with CSS generated content.

These days, most of my travel is to my biggest clients in France and Switzerland, but there’s also travel to speak at the occasional conference, and the odd business trip. Every time I travel, I take with me the same set of cables and chargers.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow afternoon (May 21st,) and sitting down with Smashing Magazine’s Vitaly Friedman for the second of my Inspired Design Decisions webinars, exclusive for Smashing members. This webinar is my deepest dive so far into the concept of compound grids and how to use them.

With modern CSS properties including Grid, Flexbox, Multi-column, and Shapes, designers have countless opportunities to make diverse, and engaging designs. Sadly, many of us haven’t had the memo which gives us permission to make more interesting work, so I decided to write that memo. Feel free to modify the message for your company or organisation and of course, circulate it to the designers on your team.

One message I wanted to put across when writing my new book was that there are already examples of art direction on the web, in products and on websites. I wanted to showcase some examples in a series of case studies.

While I was researching typefaces for a new project, I came across Dalton Maag’s case study for Universal TV. The type is beautiful, of course, but it was their graphics which got my attention.

Last year, Rachel Andrew wrote an article that took a new look at CSS Shapes in which she reintroduced readers to the basics of using CSS Shapes. In a new tutorial for Smashing Magazine, I expand on the topic of Art Direction for the Web with CSS Shapes to create exciting and inspired new design ideas.

I’ve written plenty of times before about how important it can be to look offline for inspiration to improve the things we make online. Last year, a few friends and I met in London for an inspiring visit to the Photographers Gallery.

To help celebrate the launch of Art Direction For The Web, Smashing TV’s Bruce, Scott and I spent an hour talking about my new book. The video from that conversation is now on the YouTube.

This Art Direction for the Web video course is for web designers and developers who want to understand art direction and how to make digital products and websites better.

As I mentioned on Friday, it’s taken much, much longer to produce, and is itself much, much longer than I’d planned, but my fourth book, Art Direction for the Web, will be published tomorrow. Here’s a little more about what you’ll find in the book’s almost 350 pages.

Did you buy my Art Direction for the Web video course on Vimeo? If you did, you’re entitled to free copies of the ePub, Amazon Kindle, and PDF versions of my new Art Direction for the Web book.

It’s taken much, much longer to produce, and is itself much, much longer than I’d planned, but my fourth book, Art Direction for the Web, will, at last, be published on on Tuesday 26th March by my friends at Smashing Magazine. Here’s the story behind how it happened.

I didn’t study graphic arts when I was at art school in the ’80s, but I’ve been doing a lot of catching up recently. A few years ago, I became incredibly bored with what was passing for creative design on the web at the time, and so I started to look elsewhere for inspiration for my work.

Over on 24ways, my fourteenth contribution in as many years is a tongue-in-cheek look back at how we developed websites when I started my company in 1998. In ‘Designing your website like it’s 1998’ I explain how I would’ve developed a design for ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles,’ one of my favourite Christmas films.

It’s 20 years to the day since my wife, and I started Stuff & Nonsense, our little studio and my outlet for creative ideas on the web. Over on 24ways, it’s also my fourteenth article, this time how to Design your site like it’s 1998. It’s a tongue-in-cheek look back at how we developed websites when I started my company, complete with not so old favourites like font elements, frames, layout tables, and spacer gifs.

Yes, yes, I know. It’s the week you’re bombarded with discounts on everything from electric toothbrushes to vacuum cleaner bags, but somehow never the things you want. Well, that’s about to change my friends because this weekend only, I’m offering you up to 50^% off my Art Direction for the Web video course on Vimeo.

If, on the off chance:

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You’ll have noticed that I’ve implemented a brand new dark mode version of my website.