Hearing the news of Facebooks acquisition of Instagram for a mind boggling $1 billon left many passionate Instagrammers questioning the future intentions of the owners, and their decision to sell out. The following came to me as a refreshing discovery.

Being a bit of a iPhoneography [...]]]>

Hearing the news of Facebooks acquisition of Instagram for a mind boggling $1 billon left many passionate Instagrammers questioning the future intentions of the owners, and their decision to sell out. The following came to me as a refreshing discovery.

Being a bit of a iPhoneography fan. I was very excited to hear about the Kickstarter driven project known as Snapstagram.

Snapstagram is looking to introduce a service allowing Instagram users to print their creations as opposed to simply uploading, waiting for likes/comments, then uploading some more.

Users will log in via a desktop app, select their images then order 12 shot rolls of 4×4 inch photos. The rolls some very attractive packaging and will cost around $6 including free shipping, whether that free shipping is restricted to the US we will have to wait and see.

A release date is yet to be confirmed, but I have a trip to Orlando and New York planned later this year and would love to be able to print some of my favourite snaps this way.

After setting up a local version of the less framework I found that for one reason or another, it didn’t want to work when using locally with Google Chrome. Thinking this may be a Webkit issue I thought I would would give it a try anyway, but it seems to work [...]]]>

After setting up a local version of the less framework I found that for one reason or another, it didn’t want to work when using locally with Google Chrome. Thinking this may be a Webkit issue I thought I would would give it a try anyway, but it seems to work fine.

I’ve had a look about online for this, but couldn’t find any info. Maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough… Anyway i’ve got a copy of the less.app which automatically converts your .less files to separate .css file once you set up a project and hit save. This has solved my problem for now as I can reference the .css file below the .less as a backup, but not ideal.

<link rel=”stylesheet/less” type=”text/css” href=”css/styles.less” />
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”css/styles.css”>

Another option would be to set it up within a MAMP environment.

I’ve have been toying with the idea of designing and building a new portfolio for some time now. I feel my approach and direction within the industry has changed a little over the [...]]]> This is the first in a series of posts relating to the new portfolio/blog that I am going to design and build.

I’ve have been toying with the idea of designing and building a new portfolio for some time now. I feel my approach and direction within the industry has changed a little over the past couple of years. Also with the emergence of  HTML5, CSS3 and Media Queries, my site is starting to feel a little dated and this is the perfect opportunity to put some of these new technologies into practice. There is no real rush for this as I have something up and running, but the sooner I can produce something modern and fresh, encompassing some of the latest trends the better.

Working from 9-5 tends to limit the amount of time available for personal projects, but if I can stick to a strict approach and not cut any corners, I believe I can produce the results I am looking for. With this in mind, I have been working on the following build structure that I would like to adhere to;

• UX
• Content
• Viewports and grids (i.e mobile, tablet and desktop)
• Sketches
• Wireframes
• Typography
• Design
• Technologies (i.e. HTML5, CSS3, Media Queries)
• Build
• Browser Testing
• User Testing
• Amendments
• Release

I’m hoping that coming up with a structured approach and sticking to it will be good for future projects.

With regards to the site structure. I am very much considering using my blog as the home page. I would like to push my blog as the main focus of my site. This will then be followed by a work and contact page. My logo will act as a link back to the blog/homepage.
I don’t feel the need to bloat the navigation out, so these three links will set the site structure. The site structure from then on may look something like the following;

Blog > Article
Work > Project > Launch Project
About > Social

For the design, I am considering taking a minimal approach. I want to produce something where the content speaks for itself. So my first thoughts are to center the design process mainly around Typography and use light, pastel background colours.

In the next chapter I will discuss my decisions on viewports and grids as I plan on using Media Queries to create a flexible layout.

You were given the choice of either the design or development track. Being a Front End Developer, naturally [...]]]> A little late then originally intended, but as they say “better late then never!”…Anyways, A few weeks ago I attended the Web Directions @ Media conference on the 26th and 27th May.

You were given the choice of either the design or development track. Being a Front End Developer, naturally I chose to attend talks on both tracks.

This is the first conference I have attended, and I really found it highly inspiring. The conference consisted of two days worth of talks from a selection of some very talented and inspiring speakers within the industry and I have selected a few I feel are worth a mention. Lea Verou gave us a nice introduction into CSS3 Gradients. She showed us some of creative designs that can be created without the need for any images. Check out her blog to see some of the lovely designs she has created, truly inspiring stuff.

Opera and Open Web Standards man Bruce Lawson gave a rather nice chat on Native Multimedia in HTML5, and how to make it cross browser compatible and degrade gracefully in older browsers. One area I found interesting here was the support for subtitles and captions.

Andy Clarke of Stuff and Nonsense was there to explain some of the incredible things you can do with CSS3 Animations. He showed us a demo of the popular Madmanimation, created by Anthony Calzadilla . Which like Leah Veroe, shows us some of the things we can do with CSS3 techniques, this time with Animations. Andy and his team of creatives are currently working on Animatable. This is going to be an application to help us create some nice CSS3 Animations on Webkit browsers. It really does look like it’s going to be great and I’m looking forward to it’s release.

Nicole Sullivan was on hand to tell us how to make use of all of these wonderful new CSS3 techniques, and how to use them properly with practical strategies. Google now takes performance into account, so overloading your code with too much CSS will inevitably cause slower page rendering speeds. Whilst all these wonderful new CSS3 techniques are useful, as designers we need to make sure we use them in a responsible way, with the aim of enhancing the users experience.

Thats my short and quick summary of the two days, I hope it has given you a nice little insight. There were many other inspiring speaks including talks on Psychology, including Gamification which although I found highly interesting, they are a little too heavy to cover in one blog post. There a guy there to talk about IE, but nobody cared about that, hence it was given the lunch time slot.

Thanks for reading.

On the 11th March I attended the Geek Ninja Battle – Mobile Web vs Native event at the Lighthouse Arts in Brighton, organised by Aral Balkan.
This is the first web event that I have attended, and must say that I really enjoyed it. Aral clearly clearly has alot of passion for what [...]]]>  

On the 11th March I attended the Geek Ninja Battle – Mobile Web vs Native event at the Lighthouse Arts in Brighton, organised by Aral Balkan.
This is the first web event that I have attended, and must say that I really enjoyed it. Aral clearly clearly has alot of passion for what he does and put in a considerable amount of time and effort into the evening.

Andy Clarke – Mobile Web Design
Andy of stuff and nonsense spoke a slide free presentation with just had a repeated version of Mortal Kombat II running as he went on to speak about the Original 90”s Gameboy and his box of iOmega zip drives. He explained that without his Gameboy, his save for Mortal Kombat would be redundant. Similarly, his data stored on his 100mb zip drive was useless without a zip drive reader. His point being that HTML, will always remain addressable and usable on a variety of systems including legacy systems. HTML will work on the earliest versions browsers right up to the browsers we will be using in 10 – 20 years time.

The problem with native apps is that they require proprietary hardware (a device running iOS/ Android) to view. Native apps are not addressable. A native app just provides a snapshot of that day. You can view a specific app today, read the news and consume all the content. You then close your app, go and make a cup of coffee, re open and the content is lost. You can”t then access that content form other devices. The beauty of a HTML app is that its a website. It has a constant URL and can be accessed by any internet enabled device.

“Yesterday’s Game Boys are today’s smart-phones and tablets.”

He also briefly spoke about Responsive Web Design (Media Queries) and that we need to let go of the idea that we are designing for a fixed canvas as this approach won”t scale.
You can read more about Andy Clarke”s talk here

Remy Sharpe – Mobile Web Development
Remy Sharp spoke about the ways you can make your HTML app appear more native using inline Javascript and images. This will reduce the load on your server. Combined this with a cache manifest and this will notably speed up your app. Afterall, The idea is to make your HTML app feel like a native app.

Sarah Parmenter – iOS Development
First to speak on the native side was Sarah Parmenter of You Know Who. Sarah designs purely for iOS as she like the idea of working to a fixed canvas. With a fixed screen dimensions you know the constraints you need to work within and become accustomed to this. She explained spoke about the many constraints involved including touch zones and the minimum 12px gap you need to leave between buttons.

Aral Balkan – iOS Development
Following Sarah was Aral an extablished iOS developer and User Experience advocate. Arals main argument was – whats the point in building an app for both iOS and Android and hope it runs smoothly on both? if you want to build an app for iOS, build it natively. Why build your app in another technology and rely on JavaScript to produce the native effects and hope it runs smooth on both devices. This is just going to create an average experience on both instead of a great experience on one.