Smashing Magazine recently asked me to put together an article on the Irish web design industry, and I obliged.
The article contains some great interviews with some of Ireland’s top designers, some info about what’s happening across the island and a showcase of some top notch websites.
Internet Explorer users don’t care about rounded corners. Bold statement? Perhaps. But recently I’ve taken this approach to a few designs as I’m tired of having to use some sort of rounded corner hack to support IE. It’s a lot easier to just use the CSS 3 declaration.
Had a great time at FOWA London last week. Thanks to Ryan, Jo and the Carsonified team for hosting another superb event.
Rather than listing everything that was talked about over the 2 day event I’ve put together some notes on things that stood out.
Every so often I will receive an email that asks the following:
How can I learn how to build websites?
There are two approaches you can take to learning how to build websites.
Arguably the coolest gadget at the minute (and for the last couple of years) is the iPhone. Not only do they look good in your hand, they look good on websites too. It also gets the immediate attention of any iPhone owners out there as they’ll want to know more about what your site does for the iPhone.
This is something I’m curious about and something I’d like to get your feedback on. Do you need to confirm passwords on sign up?
Thanks to Carsonified I’m speaking at the Future of Web Design Tour in Belfast on Wednesday 2nd September 2009.
I’ll be joining the lineup of Andy Clarke, Drew McLellan, Web Standardistas and others.
The Belfast event is being held in W5 at The Odyssey starting at 8.45am.
Tickets are still available at £59 (bargain for a FOWD event).
I’ve always found it interesting reading the design process of others (David Airey, Contrast, Brian Hoff). It’s good to have an insight into others work, to see if I can learn anything from their process but also for curiosity. So I’ve put together a break down of my design process, using a recent project as a real life example, Newsgroup Direct.
There are a lot of daily tasks a freelance web designer will go through:
After going through all these daily tasks, it can be very easy to see your day come and go without getting any ‘real’ work done.
When I finished University and started freelancing full time I found myself getting caught up with these daily tasks so I went about making some changes and trying to find a more effective way of dealing with them. Here are several techniques I use for getting more done.
I often browse a handful of CSS galleries for continuous inspiration but it’s good to draw inspiration from a host of other sources, one of those being packaging.
Creative packaging shows a good reflection on the brand it represents. My first real appreciation of packaging was opening my first Apple product, which was an iPod Touch. The perfectly crafted box and minimalism is reflected throughout the Apple brand, including their website. Some even go as far as to film themselves unboxing Apple products as it is such an enjoyable experience.
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