Personally, I am very fond of Style Sheet Switchers (I’ve been meaning to put one on this site for ages now, oh to have more hours in the day! I will find the time – one day). For me – they add a certain playful touch to the site if done creatively. They are however much more important functions to consider so a style sheet switch function is not only a little bit of eye candy or simply a superficial feature but can also add to the accessibility of a website. It is good to offer an alternative colour scheme which would switch the page from light coloured text on a dark background to a dark coloured text on a light background, for example. → continue reading…
it’s that time again – the end of another academic year and time for another exhibition to show off this year’s creative masterpieces.
digital arts exhibition, 23/6/09 @ The Foundry
Courses participating:
Everyone is welcome – the more the merrier ;-) hope to see you there :-)
→ download flyer
Really had been looking forward to the Easter break – a lot of design work to do and more time for that, a nice break with an aim to return full of energy for the last term with my webdesign and animation students, looking forward to seeing all the hard work pay off for them in their final major projects. So much for that…
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Though I am usually too busy to enter competitions generally – I always love looking through the entries and see the different takes, interpretations, artistic styles and creative ideas. I often feel tempted to enter – but never seem to find the time.
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Today is Ada Lovelace Day – a day to celebrate women in technology – women who inspire. Dedicated to Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace who is now understood to have been the first programmer – today is the day to pay tribute to all those women who now inspire us.
To quote the site:
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.
Even though in the field of webdesign and development women still seem to be in the minority – there are now lots of us. As you know by now – I’m not a writer so I will merely name three here ;) → continue reading…
Got home today after a busy day with my webstudents – thought I’d do a little bit of catching up on some online news. Reading some tweets – I could not quite believe it…. Molly once again managed to blow my mind, in a good and a bad way… → continue reading…
Looking for a suitable script for the popular lightbox presentation to show my web students – I went online to do some research and was quite taken back with the number of different techniques now used. With jQuery being such a light and apparently designer-friendly script – it was no surprise to find it in use extensively. I came across this great post: 10+ promising jQuery Lightbox-Clones Plugins by insicDesigns. This list shows various different techniques and makes for interesting experimenting :)
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For ages now I’ve been meaning to write up a brief tutorial on styling quotes. There are many articles out there, many great resources which talk of the different ways of styling quotes – worth a read. My aim here is to give you a bit of info on handling this popular typographical feature, hoping to inspire you to give quotes the attention they deserve.
let’s take this quote from one of my favourite web gurus
(as published on Twitter, 5/5/08):
Jeffrey Zeldman
“”
Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.
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→ a doodle for 2009
… just to wish everyone all the very, very best for the new year.
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Molly Holzschlag wrote a quite worrying post a few days ago – outlining the problems the W3C Validators are facing. These tools we all rely on are in trouble and we all need to get involved to make sure that we will not lose such essential service.
Please do read Molly’s blog post W3C Validators in Jeopardy.
For more detailed information about the W3C validator services and the current situation, or to become involved, please visit the W3C Validator Donation Program page.
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It’s this time of the year again – time is flying and the days are counting down to christmas and Drew McLellan is back with his advent calendar for geeks :)
→ 24ways.org
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Yesterday was the “Visual Web Design Master Class” with Andy Clarke – if you don’t know it already – have a look at the website ‘for a beautiful web‘ (to see it in its full glory – view the site in Safari :). I had been looking forward to this workshop as its focus was on design rather than coding. Though I love learning more new techniques and clever methods for the technical aspects – I feel I don’t have the time to delve on the design aspect of my work, though I always wish I had.
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While I’m waiting for the last session of the <head> conference to start and just wanted to record my thoughts. It’s been a very interesting and fun experience :-) thank you, Aral :)
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Just as the BlogActionDay 2008 against poverty is on its way I receive an email from Tom. His photography has taken Tom to streets, taking photos of homeless people. These photos are striking and so I felt they should be shown – they will say more than my post for this day could say. So I hope they will have an impact on you.
Asked for permission to show his photos here – Tom wrote:
“We tend to think of poverty in the sense of the major areas of deprivation … but personal poverty exists adjacent to great wealth, as the images that I have sent you are of people whose poverty does not define them, it is their present state and that state is so easily changeable with only a little effort from those around them, I have come to know these chaps, Sean and Mike and I tried to make portraits that depicted them and not their condition. Sean sits on the floor and looks at the camera and says this is me Sean, a person not an object.
Sean and his mates are the responsibility of us all, we ignore the poor at our peril … please use these images in anyway that you see fit, write what you feel is appropriate, I’m not interested in the credit for these images only in the chance that in seeing them it may spark some acts to release them from their condition.”
(14/10/08, Tom Hurley)
to support the Blog Action Day this year to raise awareness on the topic of poverty I wanted to make sure to write a really inspiring blog post. However, I am finding this quite difficult.
The fact that we live in a world where materialism rules and the funds are so unevenly spread is a very sad reality – this idea is depressing. It gets me in the deepest part of my being – mankind is still at war, still allows its own to starve – while the rich get richer and the despair of those in need grows. The injustice is just too much. Why is it not possible to solve this issue once and for all and establish a just balance?
[source photo © Diane Ehrhart, via morguefile.com]
If you are lucky enough to start learning webdesign at the moment – ideally on a mac – then you do have the perfect tools at your fingertips. The ‘Web Developer’ toolbar (Firefox extension by Chris Pederick) alone can be a great help to learning about page elements, their positioning and properties.
One of the best applications out there however must be macrabbit’s CSS Edit. Unfortunately for mac only – this code editor can make learning CSS a little bit easier. CSS Edit colour codes and tidies up your code – it allows instant preview of applied rules – and even enables you to override the CSS of any given site.
To get you started a quick introduction to its features… → continue reading…
tonight Laura and I finally made it to one of the GeekDinners :-) This evening Ryan and Elliot from Carsonified were talking about their Twitter application MATT and their famous 4 day working week. It was great to hear in more detail about their successful 4 day development time for the new application – with all its ups and downs.
An additional and unforseen highlight of the evening for me was Tantek Çelik joining the group…. It’s not often you meet the true gurus so unexpectedly. As I talk about Tantek every year with each new group of web students – meeting him in person was a treat :-)
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The update of my iPhone and the now available applications have been fantastic. It’s just wonderful to see all the various ideas, the design and attention to detail – and the nice little touches. With a lot of new and wonderful applications coming out quite regularly now – I thought I should keep a record of what I’m using myself. I’m sure this will change over time. So here are just a few screengrabs with some notes.
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The few days away, staying with Andrew in Maryport and walking in the Lake District were short but wonderful. What a beautiful place – what stunning views…
Here is a small selection as slideshow
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Unfortunately I will be busy teaching my webclass and cannot make it to the event itself – so at least I wanted to support Christian Heilmann and spread the word about his fantastic event.
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→ Design for the Web
→ Digital Animation
as the new academic year is about to begin – I would just like to promote the 2 courses I run at TowerHamletsCollege (London, Poplar) – enrolment will start the first week of september so if you’re interested – be quick and get in touch :)
if webdesign or animation are not your thing – you should have a look at Zak’s website and the courses he runs: 2d3d Visualisation and Digital Aided Fine Art
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after managing to lock myself out of the admin section for the second time – I thought I should write up a very quick tutorial on how to change the master password. So here is just a quick step-by-step on how to reset your password for the main admin user – using phpMyAdmin. For this you will need access to the control panel of your server and be able to access your WordPress database via phpMyAdmin.
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once again – the ALA team want our data. Though forms or surveys can be a pain – this one is a must for all of us being webgeeks :-)
to quote the site:
Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.
Usertesting can be one of those expensive and time consuming aspects of any website project. Though it is clear to us working on the site’s design and development how vital actual testing is – it is yet an entirely different matter to convince your client to spend time and money on it, especially if – like me – you tend to have clients who are individuals or smaller companies or organisations.
That was until a gorilla came along introducing a new alternative which looks very promising ;-)
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just came across this video and though I’m not usually into silly webclips – I did like this one here ;-) It’s nothing amazing – but I liked the idea of putting characters to fonts…
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Today I received the disc with some absolutely stunning photos of Nick, just love them (and this man!) – I had to show them here :-) Tom has been rediscovering his love and passion for photography and has taken some amazing photos. Nick became one of his recent subjects and the result is amazing. I particularly like Tom’s signature shot with the goggles. Thank you, Tom :-)
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Having just received an email from Helen Kennedy from INMD it was good to hear that Channel 4 reported on the issues facing intellectually disabled users online. I’m very glad that this is getting some media exposure – and to support this issue – I’d like to show it here.
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‘Scaffolding’ – my 2 wonderful paintings from Mags :-) → continue reading…
