Category Archives: Design

Posts relating to the theory and practice of design, particularly web design.

Redesigning Mastodon

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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…

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Your Client Does Not Know More than You

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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…

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On Responsive Design, Grids and the Golden Canon of Web Page Construction

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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…

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Web Fonts, Anti-Aliasing and @font-face

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@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…

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On Interfaces, Plugins and the finer points of Application Design

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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…

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Improving the User Experience with Browser Sniffing: UX Tips for a Better Website

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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…

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