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The concept of "card based" web design has been around for at least three years now. So why is it that the following quote from Khoi Vinh, written back in 2014, still appears to be a fundamental …

A great breakdown from Dave as to why the typical card UI pattern has some inherent issues. Some elements – like making cards all the same height and dealing with responsively collapsing card lists …

It's a long weekend, but we hadn't planned anything special. An early invite up to Scotland with my parents felt a little too risky, but a follow-up suggestion to head over to South London to catch …

Man, I wish I'd been able to put something together like this back when I was managing a content team. The ability to just type directly into an image and have the background generatively populate …

Why does this website exist? That's the question I found myself wondering today. I was making my way through the usual motions: eating lunch, catching up on RSS feeds, discovering something I found …

An interesting look at a "block links" at "card links": when you want large sections of HTML to be one big clickable link. It's a very common pattern and something I've done a lot, but …

Useful website for generating meta tags, Open Graph tags, Twitter cards, and JSON-LD …

Ahmad has put together some really interesting examples of where modern CSS techniques can replace traditional use-case for absolute positioning. I'd be really interested to know how some of them …

I've had three Xperia Z3's this year (which I've loved). The first blew out the headphone socket, so minor movements paused music (grr). The second was skewered on a surprisingly angular bollard in …

I'd really love to get micropublishing up and running on theAdhocracy. I've recently started dabbling in Flickr and it would be great to upload here and automatically have my photo's fired over …

There's isn't much to add to the above GIF, other than that I think it's a really cleverly designed and demonstrated concept. The idea of CMYK printing is nothing new to me; I've been interested in …

I believe that inspiration comes in waves. I've believed this for quite a while, largely because I'll have periods of time where I can draw really well, or feel like writing every day, or take a …

Source, one of the many blogs I follow, has recently had a themed content week focusing on security. For their main readership this means security for the newsroom, security for the journalist, but …

There are a lot of new web technologies emerging at the moment which really feel like we're entering a new era. Over the last decade, the likes of HTML5, ES6+, flexbox etc. have brought the web, and …

I've had my current Sony Xperia for nearly three years, which is a good run, but it's definitely starting to show its age. First of all the headphone jack broke; it still works, it just doesn't know …

When we got back from Christmas we had the normal stack of letters sitting on the doormat. Most were either later Christmas cards (yay!) or pointless real-world spam (boo!), but one piece of …

The GOV.UK UX and design team are fascinating. Every time I've had to use the website I've found it a breeze, which is an enormous achievement on their behalf. Better yet, they're incredibly …

I finally made it to an IndieWebCamp meetup, even if it was remote only due to the increasingly restrictive implications of the coronavirus. I learnt a lot, I had a great time, and I'm ready to start implementing a whole bunch of new ideas right here. I also took a huge number of notes from the speakers and sessions throughout the day.

Notes from the fully remote React Summit 2020 (or at least the talks I tuned in for). Lots covered, from static-site generators and the Jamstack through to React state management and accessibility. What a fun day!

Notes from my second fully remote conference, this time Sparkbox's UnConference. Being able to freely access talks from the US is a rare bonus of everything going on right now, and this did not disappoint. Musical cameos, great talks on UX, accessibility, design systems, and amazing speakers. Great event (despite the time difference).

Having hooked up Algolia with my Gatsby build pipeline and populated a search index from my Craft CMS API, the next step was the build a frontend UI to enable users to actually query my posts. It turned out to be a pretty simple process.

Marketing needs versus user experience is a topic that I have some deep misgivings over, but a recent post made me want to try and boil some of those thoughts down into their underlying rationale. I'm not sure I totally succeeded, but there we go.

Notes from the 2020 Jamstack Conf. Some interesting dives in the Jamstack community and various applications of Jamstack technologies, with tweet threads as usual.

I think there's some real merit to Andy's ideas behind Cube CSS. It's a middle-ground between everything-in-JS or BEM that throw out the cascade entirely and the free-for-all that can happen if you …

We're almost at the midway point of 2020, so I thought it would be a good moment to take a look at my New Year's challenges list and see how things were going.

The new dominant layout methods in CSS – grid and flexbox – have solved a lot of issues. Still, sometimes the ideal layout is somewhere in the middle: a flexible grid-like mashup. With a bit of outside-the-box thinking, you can there from either angle.

Jeremy is a great writer. I therefore shouldn't be surprised that his advice on content editing is incredibly …

I'm a proud owner of an LG V20, despite the phone's age. With LG's sudden decision to exit the mobile phone market, I've been thinking about why I love this phone, and what I'll do now if it ever dies.

The summer solstice started like most Sunday's of the past year: we had a fairly lazy morning, ate brunch, Alison read a bit whilst I tinkered on the microsite. And then we pulled out our drumming …

Starling Bank frustrates and impresses me in equal measure. Their technical solutions are magical – when they work – but their service is steeped in a privileged bias that makes them hard to truly recommend.