Posts relating to the theory and practice of design, particularly web design.
I ended up on Mastodon in the Great Twitter Exodus, specifically on Tŵt Cymru since I live and work in Wales. Overall it’s a nicer place, but I’ve been having some niggles with the UI. Here’s what I see when I open up the site. Part 1: fixing the left sidebar That incongruous post form…
As you might know, I’ve been gradually revamping this site, and today I turned my hand to improving the typography.
I read an article on Six Revisions today on the subject of a designer’s perceived arrogance versus the client’s better knowledge of their business. It could have been a good article; it had some very valid points, but it was completely spoiled by setting up the most egregious straw man it’s ever been my misfortune…
Before I start, let’s get some stuff out of the way: I’m no Khoi Vinh. Neither am I an Ethan Marcotte or a Jeremy Keith. I’m not a published writer on the subject of grid theory, or a speaker on the conference circuit. However, this is the Internet, where everybody has an opinion – and…
@font-face is the new darling of Web designers. With it, we can break out of the traditional web-safe font stacks and explore the full range of typography available to us in print. Of course, @font-face isn’t the first technique available to us, we’ve progressed through a number of others over the past few years so…
I’ve been thinking a lot about interface design recently. Around client projects, I’ve been working on a premium WordPress theme called Bauhaus, which I’ll shortly be releasing on ThemeForest. I’ve spent a lot of time wrangling options in the WordPress admin interface, done a lot of research across the web and I’ve come to a startling conclusion, a lot of people are doing interface design wrong. Continue reading…
Twitter is rolling out a new UI for its web client, and I think they’ve got it right. 78% of users are using the website to post and read tweets, and the updated interface incorporates a lot of features previously only available in third-party clients. So what’s new? The most noticeable thing about the new…
We’re used to using browser sniffing to work around incompatibilities, to serve different stylesheets or scripts to different User-Agents with different capabilities. Of course, that approach has fallen by the wayside in recent times, with best practice now dictating that we test for capabilities rather than browser/OS combinations in our rich UIs. However, browser sniffing…
A designer by the name of Matt Earnshaw thought he could get away with ripping off the work of David Airey, one of the most respected identity designers in the business. Here’s what happened… Continue reading…
So, here endeth my hacking of Wordpress. For now.