Design thinking

At Clearleft, our designers do not mark up their own designs. We require that they can all code well, but they never touch a line of production HTML. Why should our designers be able to code but not be required to do so?

Earlier this month, Clearleft went on a company outing to the Design Museum in London. There we spent some quality time perusing the work of the influential former Braun industrial designer, Dieter Rams. These are his ten guidelines to good design.

Christmas bargains are upon us, with indie Mac application bundles galore. Also, 24 ways is back for a third year and dConstruct t-shirts are now just a fiver!

There’s been some fascinating and handy blogs, articles, tools and references surfacing recently.

There’s an different approach to web page layout which is gradually getting some traction. The idea is that the layout is changed to best accommodate the window size.

Sorry not some wonderful cure, but instead a few sites that might be of interest: an great looking, accessible charity site and some approachs to presenting photos on web pages.

Colour blindness on the Web isn’t a big deal. You do have to bear it mind, but there is no need to let it dominate any design decisions.

It is with great pleasure I introduce the new website for Far Heath Studios.

WaSP have just released a minisite, designed by Ethan Marcotte. The purpose of Browse Happy is to spread the message to all and sundry that there are alternative browsers to Internet Explorer.

Keith Robinson starts a collaborative project with his Asterisk readers to ‘show that it’s possible to make a killer band site that looks cool and is very easy to use as well’.

I love this current poster campaign from the British Heart Foundation.

Brighton blogger and Web designer Andy Budd answers ten questions on topics including standards fascism and the success of Skillswap. Andy also echoing my own feelings on blogging.

Anyone care to deconstruct the redesign of MySQL.com? Heres a few starters.

BBC Broadcast has just released a classy new site with valid XHTML and CSS underneath the hood. Check out the transparent sliding menus built on lists.

The Web Standards Awards have just launched tp celebrate and encourage CSS-based design. The emphasis will be on commercial sites which is definitely a good thing as the Web design world as a whole has a lot of catching up to do.

The Lomographic Society website has much to admire from a design and marketing perspective, and it encourages a great photographic philosophy. But is a 35mm camera really the right medium for a snap-happy ethos, or does digital win hands down?

Fixed versus liquid design is an emotive debate. Liquid layout seems more intuitive, appropriate and elegant but is not without issues. However many concerns can be addressed with little or no compromise.

Interesting that recently Stopdesign and Simplebits have both subtly redesigned to be fixed width – moving away form their previous liquid designs. I’d love to know why.

Why and how Web designers should be using font-family in a more adventurous manner: there are some great typefaces out there – let’s use them. The Visibone survey is an invaluable aid in typeface selection.

Paul ‘Scrivs’ Scrivens of Whitespace and 9rules has created the CSS Vault, an elegant twin bladed portal comprising beautiful CSS-based sites and CSS resources. One for your bookmarks.

Mastication is Normal has started an occasional series of book cover reviews.

Every Web designer’s favourite online magazine is back! Yep, A List Apart has returned and it’s looking lush with three top new articles from Dave Shea, Joe Clark and Dan Benjamin.

Andy Budd has created a lovely design for the Zen Garden. I’m giving a SkillSwap talk this Monday on Design Process – Evolution of the Wireframe. Dave Shea has reinvigorated discussion on designing with colour deficient folks in mind and points us to Pixy’s…

“It’s not because he’s American and it’s not because the British are evil. Fundamentally, simply, basically, finally he’s just hated because he’s a twat.” On an unrelated note, get yerself over to Whitespace, a great new blog focussing…

Redesigned si-blog uses some cool position-fixed tricks to selectively scroll text over or under an banner. Also, a nifty child-selector sends a gif to IE and a superior PNG to better browsers.

Under the Iron interviews Web designers. You can even ask your own questions.

There’s a fabulous new design in the CSS Zen Garden which makes use of a clever transparent PNG effect.

The Sherwin-Williams company has published some beautiful historically accurate colour schemes.

So taken was I with Pixelsurgeon’s invalid plight (as mentioned in the previous post) that I decided to rebuild the interview page using meaningful XHTML and CSS for all layout and presentation. The markup now validates to XHTML 1.0 and is much more useful, employing…

Why I haven’t been blogging much recently and what I’ve missed over the past few weeks. Highlights include Todd Dominey’s PGA Open Championship and Phantom Power, the new album from Super Furry Animals. Also a brief critique of the new Pixelsurgeon site.

Mishoo has created a quite spectacular Web site. Using structural XHTML 1.1 (not quite valid, but the intention is clear) and CSS, the end result is visually very rich. But the most impressive bits (to me) are all his DHTML work, from some sleek animations, through mouseovers…

I enjoy minimal design, and I also believe that, for the majority of commercial and otherwise meaningful sites on the Web, that is exactly what is required. But minimal design to me, does not mean no graphics, no Flash, etc. If these elements are seen to add to the experience…

So far this year, my regular reads on the Web have covered techniques in all the disciplines required to create quality web sites. All the disciplines bar one, that is. What’s missing? The visual design; the look; the skin; the surface. While the folks I’ve been…

Mark Pilgrim recently published his version of tabs build with HTML lists and CSS. So I thought I’d publish my version of as well.

Entries for the WThRemix competition are in. Many of the entries stuck quite closely with the current W3C feel, but a few pushed the boat out a bit (as I believe was the idea of the contest). In no particular order, my favourites came from Ben Darlow, Rene Grassegger, Tom…

EasyRGB has got a great tool for determining colour harmonies, perfect for someone with my eyes. Centricle has a brilliant table of CSS filters (hacks); note the smart column/row mouseovers. And I forgot last Friday’s HMHB. I’ll make up for it this week.

Eric Meyer has created a rather nifty colour blending widget which calculates a palette between any two given colours. Fun (and funky JavaScript) and if nothing else, it’s useful for calculating the midpoint between two colours. Matt has posted a list of online style…

A while ago I pointed that more and more, Yahoo is relying on Google for it’s search results. Tim Parkin pointed out that a Yahoo listing will give a higher Google ranking, so from that point of view being on Yahoo does still have some importance. In fact, the reason a…

Interconnected has been redesigned. It’s a neat non-table, 100% CSS design in brown (definitely the new grey). Note how the whitespace of the indented paragraphs describes a square. Nice. While I was there I spotted this: Patterns for Personal Web Sites, a compendium…

It makes for really dull conversation when everyone agrees, but right now a number of people are talking sense and I feel better for it….

Beth Gibbons, of Portishead fame, has teamed up with Rustin’ Man (Talk Talk) to create a gorgeous sounding album, out today. The album is called Out of Season and has a great website which makes good use of frames† to keep a Flash 6 jukebox ever present and looping…

Yahoo! is becoming less and less relevant by the day, as it relies more and more on Google. From the Yahoo! Help pages: You may have noticed that the Yahoo! Search results look a little different. As part of our ongoing efforts to offer you the easiest and most rewarding…

The new issue of Digital Web mag sees Peter-Paul Koch extolling the fine virtues of graceful degradation. That is the honourable action of building web sites that work† on all browsers without worrying if they are pixel perfect. With care, attention & experience this…

Scene 360 asks the question of twenty three top zines and design portals: Why do you do it? A beautifully put together piece with some fascinating insight into how the likes of K10K and Design is Kinky think. The Evolution of Type, a fine introduction to the origins, evolution…

I love the work that goes on over at 37signals; they are all about focussing on the task at hand. And guess what: form does indeed follow function – I firmly believe that easy-to-use things are inherently good looking. For proof, check out the make-over of FedEx’s…

In the Guardian, a discussion of the disturbing lack of women in New Media: The rarity of women in the field of technology makes it hard to establish good networking opportunities. “It’s a great shame, because women are particularly good when it comes to the…

Adactio is a beautiful blog from fellow Brighton resident, Jeremy Keith. Try changing themes – impressive stuff. Dive Into Accessibility is an excellent guide to making your website more accessible in thirty days. With tips cross-referenced by disability, browser, design…

I’ve just come across the best website I’ve seen this year: Public Lettering – a walk in central London. The site is based on a walk by Phil Baines for his graphic design students. It examines the typography of larger examples of public lettering on and in…

Latest issue of Boxes and Arrows, the redesign of Audi.com. The process explored workgroup software, utilized technology to support the brand ideals and challenged the status quo of current web navigation thinking by proposing a right handed navigation system. Hillman…

For all you lovers of minimalism: guimp.

Just been finishing off a contract left over from before my move to Multimap (going very well thank you). I’m building a site for a client (thanks Carbon) with a traditional heirarchical navigation, however the client insists that all their navigation be images. Top level…

Zeldman has updated his CSS links and pointed us in the direction of youngpup.net and his disturbingly cool DHTML news scroller.

The 5k competition is back! So go enter those tiny sites. (Super Letraset-stylee design btw Caterina.) Oh and super-duper photos are now online here at clagnut. There’s a rndom sample for you just there. You can see more of them at clagnut.com/photos. (Yes I will get…