Charity

Give and Tell challenge

The other day my pal Si nominated me [http://sijobling.com/blog/give-and-tell-challenge/] to take part in the give and tell challenge [http://www.ceoblues.com/archive/2014/august/giveandtell], a charitable campaign started as an alternative to the ALS Ice Bicket Challenge. Why the alternative? I'll let

Comics

Comic | "New Pal"

I'm going to try put out a new strip at least once a week for the foreseeable future. I meant to post this yesterday but the bank holiday got in my way!

Comics

Comic |"New (old) discovery"

It's Monday morning. If you're feeling a bit down, hopefully this bit of forgetful silliness will make you smile.

Comics

Comic | "Kickstart"

Drew my first comic strip in years last night

iOS

Moving back to iOS

Last Summer I switched my old iPhone 4S for a Nexus 4. I'd had a Nexus 7 for some months by that point so I was familiar with Android and going by my expreience with the tablet, felt comfortable that the Nexus 4 would be a good fit.

Games

The thing about magic

We've all seen magic tricks. I even practice magic for a couple of years when I was a teenager. One of my greatest achievements with a deck of cards was figuring out a David Blaine trick (the "2 card monte" trick). I was so pleased with

Art

Apes will rise

I've been getting itchy fingers recently wanting to do some more artwork. I enjoy working on paper but I want to explore creating images digitally. This is my first proper foray, something done in anticipation of the release of the latest Apes film.

User Experience

Sod the users, full screen ads work!

As I was scrolling through my twitter feed, I came across a tweet from CreativeBloq sharing an article, which I thought I'd give a quick glance. After a short delay, my entire browser window was taken over by an ad. I brought this up in the office and

Photography

A place I want to visit

I'm not much of a traveller but I wish I was. Then I could go here...

HuddsDigitals

Dance like no-one is watching

This post details the slides and content of my short talk given at HuddsDigitals on 26th March 2013. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dancing like no-one is watching is something I try to keep in mind when it comes to creating things which is the focus of this talk. It's also linked

Web Development

SVG, Sketch and inset shadows

When it comes to SVG, I'm a novice. It's one of those aspects of web development I've had on my list to catch up on and have only just got around to it. Better late than never I suppose. My primary graphics editor has

Grid Systems

Create a cross-page grid in Sketch

Yup, another post about grids! This time it's less of a mind dump and more of a quick tip I've picked up this afternoon. Earlier this week, Tim [https://twitter.com/timharbour] linked to a Sketch plugin called Symbols [https://github.com/tisho/sketch-plugins/tree/master/

Grid Systems

The Guardian grid

I've been playing with the Guardian beta site for about a week now. I think it's a much better experience than the current site and the design feels a lot closer to the newspaper (well, what I remember of it, it's been a while

User Experience

UX crash course

Found a useful resource on my travels through the world of Twitter this afternoon. The author describes the motivation behind the idea: > My New Year’s Resolution for 2014 was to get more people started in User Experience (UX) Design. I posted one lesson every day in January, and

User Experience

User Experience is...

> User Experience is the responsibility of every member of the organization; it is a central philosophy, shared principles. It is not a series of activities and deliverables to perform, but an enlightened way of being. I found this paragraph of text particularly interesting but the rest of the article

Idea: Browser highlighting

Disclaimer: This is very much a mind-dump. I've not spent too much time researching loads of existing services at this point. One of the things I love most about reading ebooks is the ability to highlight passages without spoiling the book. I've encountered printed books with

Web Development

Sod it, time for a change

Last week at HuddsDigitals, we saw Seb Lee-Delisle [http://seb.ly/] talk about his PixelPyros [http://pixelpyros.org/] project which was showing at this weekend's Festival of Light. A few days later, I read Ashley Baxter's article on 24Ways [http://24ways.org/2013/levelling-up/] which talked

Don't throw yourself away...

Last night I read Steal Like An Artist from start to finish and felt like posting one of the many highlights [https://readmill.com/nocturnalmonkey/reads/steal-like-an-artist-10-things-nobody-told-you-about-being-creative] I made while reading... > Don’t throw any of yourself away. Don’t worry about a grand scheme or unified vision for

Good, fast and cheap

Dear clients of the world, When approaching your chosen web designer with a project and wondering how much something will cost and how long it'll take, please bear this in mind as a starter for 10: > Design something quickly and to a high standard, but then it

Process

Slaying pedantry and trolls

Since December 2008, at least once a year, I listen to Stephen Fry's podcast on language [http://www.stephenfry.com/2008/12/22/series-2-episode-3-language/]. The subject in itself is fascinating but the delivery has all the rhythm, pace and in some sense even a melody making it a

Typography

Flourish

A really nice short film showing the progress of an illustration/typography project.

User Experience

Thinking beyond the web

A couple of things has shaped the way I approach projects recently. Discussing design with Tim [https://twitter.com/timharbour] over beers has shed light on a better design process. And seeing Aral Balkan [https://twitter.com/aral] speak at Wuthering Bytes [http://wutheringbytes.com/] last month has started to

Web Design

CSS frameworks and semantics

A couple of months ago, I was having a chat on Skype with Toby Howarth [http://tobyhowarth.co.uk/] about various web-related things, one of which was CSS frameworks. It was quite late and I was just about to head to bed so I only wrote a quick reason why

Apps

Build anticipation. Deflate.

My twitter stream has been going a bit wild with updates about the launch of, and subsequent delay in use, of the new Mailbox app [http://www.mailboxapp.com/] on iPhone. There seems to be a mix of anticipation and "meh" over their chosen roll-out method so I

Web Design

Structure

To my disappointment, I was unable to attend New Adventures [http://2013.newadventuresconf.com/] conference this year so while my Twitter stream was filled with people saying how buzzed and inspired they were, I was left wondering whether I could somehow conjure up some of that excitement for myself and