Another brilliant day courtesy of  “for a beautiful web” [#fabw] :)

I had been playing around with various bits of jQuery on several sites – and really seeing the potential of enhancing my designs with it. My problem was not being able to troubleshoot errors and not being able to edit the effects properly to suit my designs. I was starting to gain more understanding and was able to do much more than I thought – but I kept hitting walls… So this workshop with the lovely Remy Sharp was just the ticket to get me going :) → continue reading…

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.

→ 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 :)
→ 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.
→ continue reading…

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):
→ continue reading…

Eric is back in town ;)

If you can spare the money and the time – this is a workshop you should not miss ;) This time around I am sadly not able to take part :”( – but I can tell you from attending last december that this is just a fantastic opportunity :) There’s nothing like hearing the master discussing CSS techniques and best of all being able to ask questions.

You probably know Eric through his books, articles and his blog – but it’s just nice to meet such an expert in person. He’s not only an inspiring speaker but also a really nice funny guy :) You’ll have a great time and learn a lot!

The price tag is quite steep and if you’re lucky enough to work somewhere you might be able to convince your boss to fork out the fee. If you are – like me – a freelancer – it might be a bit steep. But I still found it worth every penny :)
→ carson workshops / eric meyer