Blogging and all that malarkey

Yours truly over at the Smashing Magazine: “Have you ever thought about how the limitations of early cartoon animations might relate to web design today? From looping backgrounds to minimal frame changes, these retro animation techniques have surprising parallels to modern CSS.”

Website design in the ’90s was messy, but it was also magical. It was frequently fraught with accessibility, performance, and usability problems that took us years to solve. But while we addressed them, we discarded much of what was captivating about early websites and replaced them with conservative, commodity designs.

Yours truly over at the Envato blog: “Have you ever considered how ’90s animations might relate to web design today? I show how they inspired a new website design for Emmy-winning composer Mike Worth.”

The more I dive into using the GSAP library for my Toon Title animations, the more I enjoy it. Here’s another Toon Title, this time based on Space Bear, a Yogi Bear cartoon from February 1960. I learned some new things while making this Toon Title, including how to use GSAP’s timeline feature.

Yours truly over at CSS Tricks: “Designing Mike Worth’s website gave me a chance to blend expressive design with modern development techniques, and revisiting image maps reminded me just how important a tool image maps were during the period Mike loves so much.”

For the past couple of days I’ve been looking at the software and services I pay for as I want to streamline costs where possible and reduce the amount of my money that ends up in the USA.

The more I dive into using the GSAP library for my Toon Title animations, the more I enjoy it. Here’s another Toon Title based on Nowhere Bear, a Yogi Bear cartoon from December 1959.

Here’s another Toon Title based on Bear Face Bear, a Yogi Bear cartoon from September 1959. I’ve been meaning to experiment with GSAP for a while, and this animation gave me the opportunity.

Here’s another Toon Title and one of my favourites from my growing collection of reanimated Yogi Bear titles. This one’s based on Stranger Ranger, a Yogi Bear cartoon from November 1959.

Yours truly over at the Envato blog: “How can a long-defunct popular music magazine for teens influence the design of today’s websites?”

I had some spare time today between client work and meetings, so I added another Toon Title to my collection. This one’s based on The Buzzin’ Bear, a Yogi Bear cartoon from December 1958.

Designing for Mike Worth’s new website reminded me how much I love classic cartoons. So, after handing over his design, I carried on exploring CSS, SVG, and SMIL animations. I now have a growing collection of Toon Titles.

I now have a growing collection of Toon Titles. But while making them, I discovered two gotchas, which I haven’t seen documented. One for Firefox, the other for Safari.

Yours truly over at CSS Tricks: “I’ve used border-image regularly. Yet, it remains one of the most underused CSS tools, and I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why. Is it possible that people steer clear of border-image because its syntax is awkward and unintuitive? Perhaps it’s because most explanations don’t solve the type of creative implementation problems that most people need to solve. Most likely, it’s both.”

Yours truly over at the Envato blog: “What do you see when you look at a movie poster? Is it simply advertising to promote a movie or a piece of artwork you’d potentially hang on your wall at home or in an office?”

Yours truly over at the SQSP Themes blog. “CSS Media Queries already make Squarespace websites responsive, but there will frequently be times when you’ll need to make elements responsive to their containers, not just to the viewport. Thankfully, CSS Container Queries are now widely implemented in browsers, and there are ways to use them on Squarespace websites.”

Yours truly over at the Envato blog: “When I was growing up in the 1980s in a steel-making town that had lost its steelworks, there was a thriving subculture of fanzines and fly posters printed in garages and community centers.”

Yours truly over at CSS Tricks: “Honestly, it’s difficult for me to come to terms with, but almost 20 years have passed since I wrote my first book, Transcending CSS. In it, I explained how and why to use what was the then-emerging Multi-Column Layout module. Yet, CSS Columns remains one of the most underused CSS layout tools. I wonder why that is?”

Yours truly over at the SQSP Themes blog. “From a CSS perspective, Squarespace covers almost everything. However, here are five CSS rules you should consider adding to your Squarespace Custom CSS boilerplate to enhance accessibility, text rendering, and user experience.”

Yours truly over at the SQSP Themes blog. “Squarespace is (obviously) the platform of choice for intergalactic space warriors. So, less than a week before Count Binface was due to announce his manifesto, the challenge was to develop my designs into a new website using Squarespace.”

While more established artists, bands, composers, sound designers, and other music professionals often have a bigger budget to spend on their websites, plenty more choose the DIY route with Squarespace or Wix. To help those people stand out, I added three new designs to my Squarespace templates store.

With Christmas and New Year just around the corner, this is my final post of 2024. It’s been an interesting—but certainly not the best—year.

In September, I launched my range of Premium Squarespace templates inspired by the work of past masters of design. Now, I’m giving them a huge update.

Charities, NGOs, and non-profits are some of my favourite clients. I’ve been fortunate to work with Greenpeace and WWF, to name two. Balancing creative direction and user-experience design is one of my favourite things to work on. In this video, I talk about the charity Crisis and its website and how they might make the facts about homelessness more real through their design.