New media industry blog posts

  • Avoiding groupthink: fine-tuning CSS specifications

    Every now and then I’m asked to help out the CSS Working Group, especially when typography is involved. Invariably it’s also a chance to learn, not just about upcoming CSS, but also new methods of collaboration and group decision making.

  • One year on and what next for remote working?

    Since the UK locked down 52 weeks ago, Clearleft folks have been working fully remotely. As the vaccine works its magic, in a few months time we’ll be able to move back into our studio. What happens then?

  • The importance of putting your champions on a pedestal

    A champion is the person in your client’s organisation who can pinpoint the barriers to a great solution going live. Champions are obstacle clearers, problem insulators and praise singers. Find them and treat them with the reverence they deserve.

  • It’s time to stop teaching web skills like it’s still 1999

    Design Week had an editorial highlighting the demise of craft skills and typography in college curricula. It reminded me that courses teaching web design in the UK rarely include such skills in the first place. So where are the good courses?

  • Why designers should and shouldn’t code

    At Clearleft, our designers do not mark up their own designs. We require that they can all code well, but they never touch a line of production HTML. Why should our designers be able to code but not be required to do so?

  • Microformats for business owners

    An explanation of the practical benefits that microformats can bring to a business and its customers, written with the business owner in mind.”

  • Deviating from process

    We at Clearleft are starting to enjoy deviating from process. Skipping steps, changing the order, adding extra steps, using different tools. This all keeps us fresh, but it also helps eliminate the production line approach it’s so easy to fall into.

  • Portfolio Clinic

    Just a quick a note to all budding freelancers in the Brighton area to get your work down to the Portfolio Clinic tonight, where Clearleft and a host of other local creative companies will be on hand to offer advice.

  • Top ten tips for web typography

    The latest issue of Design Edge Canada magazine – a publication for Canada’s graphic design industry – was a web typography special for which I contributed top ten tips for web typography.

  • A List Apart web design survey

    As noted by Zeldman, there is a strange absence of data about the web design industry. A List Apart has set about trying to change that, resulting in the Web Design Survey. If you’re a web designer of any description, you should fill it out.

  • Arial 12pt

    Getting work with governmental bodies frequently involves a tedious, time consuming, tendering process with spurious clauses bad for the soul.

  • Career path for web designers

    In my post on creating a professional body for web designers I suggested that a function should be to help with the ‘continued professional development’. Christina Wodtke has been considering options for extending one’s career as a web designer.

  • Professional body for web designers

    Mark Boulton has written a thoughtful post on having a professional body for web design. I commented in detail there, but I wanted to expand my thoughts on the subject, particularly on certification and the need for such an organisation.

  • At @media again

    So I’m off to @media for the rest of this week – can’t wait! And in other news I have an article in this month’s Practical Web Design magazine.

  • Google buys Measure Map

    Well I didn’t really see that coming. Jeff Veen, Product Director for Measure Map, reports that Measure Map has been acquired by Google, and according to Adaptive Path, he’s going there with it.

  • When I’m 94

    A few weeks ago my Great Uncle Jack passed away aged 94. Throughout Uncle Jack’s house were stacks of annotated photos. But what would happen when I’m 94 and dead and buried? The digital age could prove to be an archivist’s dream or a nightmare.

  • Website analysis tools

    In recent commentary, people have lumped together Google Analytics, Mint and Measure Map as three new traffic analysis tools all competing with each other. The reality is somewhat different.

  • Post d.Constructivism

    So d.Construct is over. It all seemed to go swimmingly well and there has been a fantastic positive response from everyone who attended.

  • A new beginning

    After months of preparation I’m immensely pleased to announce that Andy Budd, Jeremy Keith and I have joined forces to form Clearleft, which officially launched on Monday.

  • The state of accessibility in the real world

    One of the prime reasons for going to @media was to learn more from recognised experts in the field of accessibility, and yet I came away confused and disillusioned about the state of the things.

  • What’s in a word?

    @media wrapped up with a Hot Topics discussion panel. One of the hot topics suggested by an attendee was ‘semantics’. There seems to be something of an obsession with the word in web circles.

  • At @media

    M’learned colleague, Andy Hume and I have just picked up our badges and (orange!) bags for @media 2005 (a day early so I don’t have to catch a stupidly early train). Big congratulations to Patrick for getting this far and still managing to stay cool –…

  • Multimap is hiring

    Multimap is looking to hire a junior web designer/developer to assist the Multimap.com public site development team. The job is based in London.

  • Bug Report, Design Engaged and PowerPoint

    PPK has a new browser resource called Bug Report. Design Engaged looked to be hugely successful and fascinating (link to a terrific animation). Veen talks about the difficulty of ditching the PowerPoint mentality.

  • BBC News Online Wikiproxy

    Stefan’s Wikiproxy of BBC News Online which, among other things, links all Capitalised Phrases to their associated entry in Wikipedia.

  • Web Essentials blog

    Web Essentials is almost upon us and now it has a blog. On a vaguely related note, CSS Vault recently pointed to some demonstrations of CSS in scientific web publishing in particular rendering mathematical expressions.

  • It’s an honour to be nominated… again

    As last year, Clagnut has been lucky enough to be nominated in Personal category of the Brighton and Hove Virtual Festival Web Awards 2004. You can vote for Clagnut here. I’m up against Adactio and Chris Eubank (yes, the Chris Eubank) amongst others, so I guess my…

  • Real life savings through Web standards

    Following on from Doug Bowman’s recent article on potential bandwidth savings for Microsoft, in which he recounts using CSS to rebuild Microsoft’s home page, I’d like to restate here the points I made in my Ten Questions interview with the Web Standards Group.…

  • Web Essentials 04

    Web Essentials 2004 looks to be an inspiring conference on Web standards, and a really good excuse to travel to Syndey late September/October. The conference will cover the key aspects of web standards: accessibility, markup (HTML/XHTML) and presentation (CSS). The…

  • Welcome

    Cypriots, Czechs, Estonians, Hungarians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Maltese, Poles, Slovaks and Slovenians: welcome to the European Union as of today. Are any of you Web designers we should know about?

  • Pop-ups of the street

    Pop-ups aren’t going away. They are leaving virtual space and manifesting themselves on our streets in blue and yellow and green bibs.

  • Web Standards Awards

    The Web Standards Awards have just launched tp celebrate and encourage CSS-based design. The emphasis will be on commercial sites which is definitely a good thing as the Web design world as a whole has a lot of catching up to do.

  • Reasons for broadband

    Household broadband purchasers are more pragmatic then ISPs seem to think. And if marketeers think that filling broadband with whizzy stuff is a good idea, then their swing-top bin will soon overflow.

  • Perfect client

    Discussion on the perfect client, demonstrated by a great little project we did for the IBM GCat team.

  • TBL versus Eolas

    As Director of the W3C Tim Berners-Lee has written a typically cogent letter to the US Patent and Trademark Office in protest against the Eolas ‘906 Patent.

  • A List Apart returns

    Every Web designer’s favourite online magazine is back! Yep, A List Apart has returned and it’s looking lush with three top new articles from Dave Shea, Joe Clark and Dan Benjamin.

  • ISSN refused

    I’ve just had an email back from the ISSN UK Centre, once more turning down my request for an ISSN for Clagnut.

  • International Standard Serial Number

    A year ago I applied for an ISSN for Clagnut; my request was turned down. Weblogs are eligible for ISSN under the existing guidelines and I explain how there are increasingly compelling practical reasons for assigning ISSN to weblogs.

  • On Information Design

    The Design Council has published a detailed look at what information design is and what is expected from information designers.

  • Normal service resumes

    Friday Biscuit: Out of curiosity
    I dug up Logie Baird
    And I asked him what petrified forests see<
    To make them all so scared. from Albert Hammond Bootleg on Back In The D.H.S.S. The website for this year’s Brighton Festival has got some thoughtful bits of…

  • Crunch

    The real reason the West Pier collapsed. Nice one Bricey. More on the Glasshaus collapse. It seems that Wrox’s parent company, Peer Information, is the one to be liquidated, along with all its assets. Many ex-employees have posted their details on Graphic Design…

  • A sad loss

    It seems that Glasshaus, publisher of some great web design books, has gone out of business. The rumour is that their parent company, Wrox Press, is broke, so all the publishing houses below them are gone as well. Glasshaus weren’t around for long, but managed to capture…

  • The good, the bad & the funny

    Netscape’s DevEdge has been redesigned as a standards showcase. Yes, another important web site has been redesigned and built without table-layout. Visually, it’s hardly cutting edge, but is easy on both the eye and the mouse. The drop down menus are rather splendid…

  • Sniff snort sneeze

    Don’t come too close, I’ve got a shocking cold. The sort of cold some people would call ’flu. These people have clearly never had ’flu. ’Flu is a proper illness, not to be sniffed at . You’re out of action for a week. I mean totally out of…

  • Pop off

    The welcome demise of the pop-up, and some welcome alternatives.

  • The trial

    From Pythonesque to Kafkaesque. Having been denied a visa to re-enter the USA, Russian programmer, Dmitry Sklyarov faces the dilemma of being legally unable to enter the States to attend a trial he is legally obliged to testify in. Sklyarov is at the centre of the first DMCA…

  • On your marks…

    Judging of the Guardian Best British Blog began this weekend. And yes, it was the kick up the backside I needed to get the About page up. This compo has other ramifications, particularly if you should win (like you may have to spend the prize money to pay for the extra…

  • We’re hiring!

    Multimap is hiring. If you fancy working in London for a small, friendly company and are skilled in Perl, Unix/Linux, Oracle/MySQL, XML, OOP/OOD and maybe a bit of GIS then please send us your CV or resumé. Stereolab have a really original way of presenting their…

  • Clagzilla

    Why the change in name? To add my voice to the groundswell of support for Davezilla, a popular (and very funny) blogger who has been crudely targeted by Toho, owners of Godzilla®. Initially, Dave was intending to remove his offending ‘little dragon guy’, but is…

  • Girls, girls, girls

    In the Guardian, a discussion of the disturbing lack of women in New Media: The rarity of women in the field of technology makes it hard to establish good networking opportunities. “It’s a great shame, because women are particularly good when it comes to the…

  • rusty rusting

    “Advertising is not a means of supporting media. Media is an excuse for presenting advertising”, as purported by rusty in his sane insight into The Economics of a Web Community. And more particularly why kuro5hin is broke.

  • Bloody BT

    Did you know that the pillar of corporate scum that is BT claims to have invented hyperlinking? Nor did I, but Prodigy do. They were unlucky enough to be the first ISP attacked by BT in the courts for abusing the US patent it submitted in 1979. A decision on whether the case…

  • Real on virtual

    How real world events affect Internet traffic. Here is a Multimap.com bandwidth graph for the day that England beat Argentina: As you can see the match was between 12pm and 3pm. Note the little spike as people logged back on at half time for a quick fix of maps before the…

  • No Butt, don’t shoot !

    England through, Argentina out. Smashing. In the Guardian on Brazil’s 5–2 mauling of Costa Rica: “do not under any circumstances miss the highlights of this match tonight. It’s better than sex. Well, it’s certainly better than any sex I’ve…

  • Sad

    It is with much regret that I have to inform you of the demise of linesandsplines. A beautiful intellectual web log dedicated to the joys & aesthetics of typography. Often way above my amateurish knowledge of the subject – but that was the point for me – how…

  • Comeuppance is due

    The reprehensible Verisign continue to screw things up for innocent, fee paying consumers.

  • No such thing as a free breakfast

    Yesterday morning I had a ‘free’ breakfast courtesy of Easynet. BT have finally got around to unbundling the local loop around here and Easynet are cashing in by offering local businesses Broadband for Breakfast™ (yes it is a trade mark). Fellow pillars of…