Not much to say apart from — enjoy :)
When I saw this video via @ilovetypography on Twitter – it was such a treat :) I wanted to just abandon any work there and then and sit down to draw out some lettering. Alas, there was no time for play. I wanted to keep this easily accessible to share and pass on – so here it is. Do enjoy :)
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another busy year is coming to an end… and a new decade upon us…
Time keeps flying … & this year brought some fantastic projects my way. I really enjoyed working with some new people, being pushed way past my comfort zone but ended up learning a hell of a lot (thanks, Ash :*). Now I just hope the new year will bring more of the same :)
So I just want to wish everyone happy holidays and all the very, very best for 2010 :)
Around Easter I wrote a post about cuts to my animation course. This was a very difficult time for our students as well as us as tutors. I did not write this post to cause trouble or to put Tower Hamlets College down – but it was rather a cry for help, a story about our wonderful courses and the worrying developments which will eventually bring on their closure.
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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…
→ a doodle for 2009
… just to wish everyone all the very, very best for the new year.
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.
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]
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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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 ;-)
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.
‘Scaffolding’ – my 2 wonderful paintings from Mags :-) → continue reading…
today is the last day of the INMD workshop – on the program for today is more usertesting and an afternoon of talk from selected experts. I will try to keep notes as we go along today as I am not sure whether I will have time to write this up afterwards. → continue reading…
yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting Andy Clarke and attending his workshop “Transcending CSS: Styling For A Beautiful Web”. It was a great day with quite a few ‘lightbulb moments’ for me.
It was great to listen to such clear and to-the-point explanations and I finally clicked with relative positioning ;-) Andy presented a beautiful demo site inspired by Billy Bragg and talked about a lot of wonderful techniques. It was inspiring to hear Andy’s take on the different issues and I was glad to find my own opinions were very much along the same lines…
Hopefully, if time allows, I will soon try to write a post about some of the things I’ve learnt. For now – I can’t wait to implement a few CSS techniques and start by creating a new and cleaner CSS for this site here :)
THANKS, Andy :)
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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…
having missed it the last 2 years – I’m on time this year to join the united efforts of “CSS naked day” :)
To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the
Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.
with so many beautifuly designed sites out there – it can be very distracting to browse around… with my webstudents now starting to work on their own portfolio site designs – I simply want to show a small number of links to portfolio sites which are visually very strong as well as very different:
javascript… the superior geek’s land… as many times before, I again feel I need to face another challenge in coding… as with handcoding – before facing it I thought my visual mind would not be able to handle the code – I feel this is even more so the case with Javascript. → continue reading…
[part of the INMD project]
PROJECT PAGE: PingPong game for ID players
OUTLINE: This game is intended for the ID group with the most severe intellectual disability.
It is therefore intended to be played with assistance, at least for the start of the game. It can be played by 1 person alone – or be played as a 2 player game, each player taking charge of 1 side of the game (left/right black bar and their corresponding half of the screen/projection). → continue reading…
Today was the day #2 of the Inclusive New Media Design workshops – and it was a very interesting day as I learnt about people with ID (Intellectual Disablility) and their perspective on every day life as well as their use of the internet. I’m hoping there will be some reference material going up on the INMD site over the next few days which will be good to read.
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Today was the first day of the Inclusive New Media Design workshops – to quote the site:
Inclusive New Media Design is a research project which aims to identify the best ways to encourage web designers and developers to build websites accessible to people with intellectual disabilities.
just summing up a few points which should by now be standard practice (WCAG 1.0 discussion points from Simon Evans):
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Usually, I don’t really comment much on the debates happening online though I do follow them with interest. The reason for not writing much in my own blog here is partly because I don’t consider myself a ‘proper’ blogger (don’t think I am very good at writing – much more of a visual person) and partly as I simply do not have the time. This issue of accessibility however does really get to me – and I find some of the attitudes out there quite shocking – and really sad – so I felt I needed to draw attention to this.
Today is blog action day for the environment – running a bit late I still wanted to join in and air my grievances on the amount of paper we waste whereas the digital environment would make most of it entirely unnecessary.
Working in education – the amount of bureaucracy involved seems to grow at a steady pace throughout the years. As a student – where you would fill in about 3 medium length forms a few years ago – you now have to work your way through seemlingly endless numbers of forms. As a tutor – you are bombarded with endless sheets of paper: meeting notes and minutes, schemes of work for your lesson, lesson plans, project briefs, observations, assessments…. and the list goes on….
Though the purpose or necessity of these is worth debating in itself – the issue bothering me most here is the endless amount of paper used… surely a lot of these formalities can be taken care of digitally?
Since taking over the running of my current courses I have been preparing all paperwork as editable PDFs for everyone in my team to use. We use the PDFs for all documentation required, keep numerous digital copies of everything needed and save whole archive folder loads of paper. Apart from cutting down on paperwaste – there are other clear advantages of using digital files – such as easily being able to edit the information, easy and fast distribution, efficient backup and so on…
So I am all for a paper-free office environment :)
just came across this icon – the great Firefox devouring the evil IE. It really made me smile… what a nice thought…
It looks like it’s quite old and unfortunately I have no idea who created this graphic. But I liked to so much I had to display it here – doesn’t this just show what you as webdesigner wish could happen…?
Wouldn’t it be great to send out a nice little fox to kill the monster which has been causing havoc with any nicely coded site…? Never having to confront that horrid blue ‘e’ again… no more hacks, ever… well, we can dream…
If anyone knows who created it – please do let me know, I would be happy to give credit where credit is due :)
Even though the weather doesn’t seem to be on our side – I hope you are enjoying the show ;)
Please let us know what you think – we welcome any feedback, comments … or anything else you’d like to say :)
Even though I had planned to start working with my wonderful ‘eyedea’ team once our site was finished and ready to be launched – our reputation seems to have done wonders and we have had put our own site on the backburner for now in order to do work for our clients. I am very happy to say that we have a number of great projects in development at the moment and that our team work is working out even better than expected ;)
With all the interest in our work – web design as well as online training – we decided to put our site online, even though only the ‘eyelearn’ courses’ section is done (if yet to be expanded). So feel free to have a look – we welcome any feedback and comments ;)
eyedea.eu
as much as I hate filling in forms and other pointless bureaucracy ” this survey aims to find out more about us ” – people in webdesign. The added bonus is that it’s setup by the lovely people from ALA and so it was straight to the point, clearly presented and very quickly done ;)
We’re still young as an industry and with the debates going around on qualifications “do we really need formal qualifications?” and gender “well, what about us geeky web girls?” it will be interesting to see the results.
so go on, answer a few questions – it will only take a few minutes….. you know you want to ;)
Just read the most brilliant news ;) about Molly Holzschlag joining the IE team….
By the looks of it – there might be hope yet. It is great to see such as strong CSS advocate joining Microsoft – and taking away all excuses for slow take up of proper css support…. ;)
» Working together for a better web
Here’s wishing Molly good luck – and us all an easier ride in the future ;)