Fat Fonts

I’m currently redesigning this blog and I’m trying to find the right sort of font for the title. I’m looking for a font that I’ll call "fat". As I’m not a trained graphic design person, I’m sure there’s a proper term in typography, but what I mean is a font where, for instance, the white […]

Gliffy: Diagrams on the Web

I used to use Microsoft Visio for my diagramming needs. It’s a brilliant tool, but most of my independent client work doesn’t require UML documentation - it’s more business orientated.
However, I do need diagrams occassionally, and I make a trade-off and use a drawing package (it’s much cheaper than buying Visio).
It looks like there’s a […]

Apartment Carabeo

I’ve built a small website for a friend for his holiday apartment in Nerja in Southern Spain. It’s a 2-bed apartment and there’s still availabiility. The website address is http://www.carabeo.co.uk.
The site was built using Wordpress, generally considered more as a blogging platform, but it serves well as a site building platform, especially when there is […]

Oxford Geeknights

Those nice people at Torchbox are organising a Geeknight in Oxford on February 7th for all sorts of local people (Swindon is local, I guess) involved in web design and development.
It looks like a lot of fun… 
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Smashing Magazine

By co-incidence, I was reading Digg, when I saw a link to Smashing Magazine about some nice free fonts, and then I noticed Simon Collison linking to their article on 53 CSS techniques (which are very groovy).
I had a look around. Looks good. Have a look:-
Smashing Magazine
 

Resources for Designers

A friend of mine put me onto a new, and useful site. The site is called veer.com and contains all sorts of useful things for sale. Fonts, Graphics, Illustrations and more.
There’s another site whose graphics I intend to use for my next project - a site called IconBuffet that sells packs of icons for websites. 
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Voting Machines

Re: Montgomery to Extend Voting Hours After Election Glitches
A bunch of voting machines wouldn’t work, so voters had to come back later. That’s bad design.
I’m not impressed with the idea of voting machines. It seems to me that it’s a risky solution with very little benefit.
Paper and pencil works just fine. You don’t need operators […]

Skoda Web Design

I checked out the Skoda website as I’m considering one of their cars.

I’m very pleased that Skoda have won some awards. But, I don’t want a test drive, and I can’t see where to go to just get to the site and check out the MPG/price of their cars.
OK, I found it after a while. […]

Swindon Techs/Bloggers Meetup

I’m trying to set up a monthly event (probably 1st Wednesday of the month) for people involved in blogging, tech, open source software, graphic design, web design and all that as a social meet-up, probably somewhere like Wood Street. The idea is that it will be a no agenda, informal gathering.
If you’re involved in any of […]

Ugly Design

I’ve just finished reading a piece by Jason Santa Maria called Pretty Ugly  that sums up much of my view about good design.
The fundamental thing about web based applications (or, any software application) is how well they work. It’s why I’m often against the "design the UI first" approach. The approach I follow is:-

What does the system […]