I am really excited to be able to announce the publishing of my guest author post, HTML5 Custom Data Attributes (data-*) on the HTML5 Doctor website.
I have used HTML5 Doctor as a learning resource many times in the past and it feels great to be able to give a little something back.
Many thanks to Richard Clark, Remy Sharp and Mike Robinson for their constructive feedback on the article.
All the cool kids are dribbling, why can’t I?
I haven’t felt this left out since my mum refused to buy me proper Nike trainers at school. Dribbbling is a new phenomenom all about sharing what you are working on and getting encouraging, inspiring and constructive feedback from other designers.
I think it is a fantastic idea and I love the execution of it, the site is simply stunning. Unfortunately dribbble is still an invite only proposition which is a bit whack if you are not friends of friends of the creators or an internationally renowned design super hero.
Whilst I am still unable to dribbble in public I thought I would dribbble in private and put out a blog post with the shots I would be dribbbling if I could.
These shots are both from projects I am currently working on and any dribbble-esque feedback on either would be much appreciated.
PS - If anyone out there has a spare dribbble invite they could send my way I’d be as happy as a kid with proper Nike trainers.
UPDATE: I now have my very own Nike trainers thanks to the lovely Matt Carey!
Last night I came across a new post on stuff and nonsense entitled Could you be a dick? in which Andy Clarke challenges the world to come up with a spoof business card for a private investigator.
I was rather amused by this proposition and set to work on my own idea which has now been uploaded to the Hardboiled card flickr group. The nine best entries (as judged by Mr Clarke himself) will go on to feature in the pages of his forthcoming book “Hardboiled web design” to assist in the explanation of CSS3 selectors.
This blog post is a follow up to a post I made last month called Snap Bird - Flexing my design muscles. In last month’s post I presented the results of an evening spent doodling design ideas for a new Twitter search app called Snap Bird.
Shortly after my last post, Snap Bird creator Remy Sharp (@rem) replied to my email and said that he wanted to incorporate some of my ideas into the Snap Bird design. A couple of weeks later, after some great work from Clearleft’s Paul Annett (@nicepaul), the final Snap Bird design has now been launched.
Much to my delight, my bird illustration has been adopted as the Snap Bird mascot and has also been made into a favicon!
Many thanks to Remy and Paul for a credit in the final design, much appreciated.
Last Friday I got up early and headed south on the train. My destination was the Duke of York Picturehouse in sunny (couldn’t be farther from the truth) Brighton. The reason for this outing was the first ever Full Frontal JavaScript conference, organised and curated by Remy Sharp (@rem).
On arrival in Brighton I was faced with a 10 minute uphill trudge in the rain. This was not an ideal start to the day but, before too long I had successfully navigated to my destination, which as had been pointed out to me a couple of days earlier “cannot be missed” due to a massive pair of stocking-clad legs sticking out of the roof. After a well needed cup of tea and two (yeah that’s right, two!) pain au chocolat I settled down into what must have been the most comfortable conference seat ever and prepared myself for the day’s talks.
Full frontal was a day of firsts… It was the first time I had been to a purely javascript conference, it was the first time I had properly understood closures (thanks to @robertnyman) and most importantly, it was the first time I had ever been to a conference where I had enjoyed every single talk. This was a brilliant suprise because in the past at conferences I have always found myself clock-watching in at least one presentation and wishing it would finish so I could go and get another free tea and danish.
The highlight of the day for me was Robert Nyman’s talk, which was a fantastic (albeit heavily Ben Affleck orientated) summary of everything you needed to know in order to be a JavaScript wizard. I also really enjoyed Jake Archibald’s talk on performing your own JavaScript performance research and how best to incorporate JavaScript libraries. The humour and enthusiasm he put into this potentially very boring topic was excellent.
Another thing that really impressed was the quality and originality of the presentation materials used, with three out of the seven talks not using powerpoint or keynote. Jake Archibald’s presentation was done entirely in flash, which despite being a little controversial for a JavaScript conference was incredibly well designed and animated. Stuart Langridge had made his own Javascript/CSS3 web-based presentation software, which he later told me would be available to download once he could sort out all the “fucking trigonometry”. Last but not least was Simon Willison’s presentation, which consisted of an original and brave navigation around 16 Mac OSX spaces arranged in a 4 x 4 grid, it was pretty hectic but it worked.
All in all the conference was a wonderful success and I really hope it happens again in 2010. The night ended with what was possibly the best burger I have ever tasted and a few beers at the OHSO Social on Brighton beach. Higher resolution versions of my photos are available on flickr along with many others in the Full Frontal Conference pool.
Last night whilst catching up with twitter I saw the following tweet from Remy Sharp…
“Found a decent name for my app: http://snapbird.org - as in “snap! I’ve found my tweet”, pretty design hopefully soon-give-or-take” - @rem
Snap Bird is essentially an enhanced twitter search application that Remy has built to find archived tweets which are more than seven days old. I liked the idea and also liked the name ‘Snap Bird’ and I then began to wonder what a snap bird might look like if it where real creature. Before I knew it, this day dreaming had spawned an impromptu design session and moments later I’d cracked out Fireworks and had begun creating an illustration of a snap bird.
From this simple character I continued to develop a logo/brand and before too long I had created an entire layout for the Snap Bird home page.
I was quite pleased with how this design had turned out and decided to email Remy a link to the design to see if he was interested in using it to replace the largely unstyled version that he currently has up. As yet I have had no reply, although judging by further tweets from Remy today, it seems that he has already begun work on his own design.
I look forward to seeing what he produces.
EDIT: Find out what happened in this follow up blog post