January 25 2012
Today, I interrupt the normal flow of web-, tech-, and design-related blog posts for something a little more personal. It’s not profound, not particularly important, and of no relevance to anyone but me. But it’s something I wanted to write down for posterity. Because today was an entirely normal day and, in hindsight, it’s normal days that warrant remembering the most.
I took Ozzy out for his regular lunchtime walk, across the fields near where we live. He loves the fields because he has the chance to run around, investigate all the strange smells, and attempt to find the occasional tasty poo snack. I love the fields because you can see for miles across the rolling hills and the countryside is spectacular no matter in which direction you look; even on a dull, grey, rather nondescript day like today. It’s relaxing, and I think we both enjoy the fact that we very rarely meet another soul; not even from afar. We get to enjoy all this open space and it’s just us.
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January 20 2012
In making the move to responsive web design, one of the potential hurdles is the rather awkward maths for calculating the percentage-based widths necessary for fluid layouts. If, for example, you’re designing with a 960px grid in Photoshop and you have six columns, each 140px wide, you divide 140 by 960 to get your percentage-based width: 14.583333%. Now, I don’t know about you, but numbers like that look a little scary. It doesn’t matter that there are great calculation tools built into TextMate to do the maths for you; the point is that the final figure looks like an arbitrary number with no immediate relation to either the container’s pixel width (960) or the element’s pixel width (140).
Compare that to a container that has a width of 1000px. 1000 is a nice, easy, round number. Dividing by 1000 results in clean percentages and better still, dividing by 1000 is something we can do in our heads: just remove the zero. A 140px column inside a 1000px container is 14%. A 500px column in a 1000px container is 50%. 320px is 32%. Easy!
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December 29 2011
As the end of the year rapidly approaches, it’s time for me to write my annual review of the year that has been and my hopes for the year that will be; my main hope being, of course, that the world does not end. That would be bloody annoying.
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December 21 2011
Although I’m concerned that my recent blog posts are starting to resemble nothing more than a long list of project announcements, this is a big one, and one I couldn’t keep quiet about before the end of the year. Please forgive me, because hopefully you’ll find this as exciting as I do!
Last month, when I blogged about Keir and I forming Viewport Industries, I alluded to a ‘sequel’ to Insites: The Tour (the series of small evening web-focused events we ran across the UK over four nights) and many believed it to be a follow-up tour or perhaps even a bigger, all-day event. It is neither. The sequel is Insites: The Book.
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December 16 2011
Greetings from San Francisco, where earlier this week I spoke at An Event Apart. I’ve done seven events this year — New Adventures (Nottingham), FOWD (London), The Brand Perfect Tour (London), Interlink (Vancouver), Insites (Bristol), Flash On The Beach (Brighton), and now the aforementioned An Event Apart — and with the exception of the panel discussion at The Brand Perfect Tour and the informal chat at Insites, I’ve stuck to one presentation throughout the year: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. Now that I’ve done the final event that uses this talk, I thought now would be a good time to put it online and share some notes.
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