Frontend & Web Design Blog

The people over at Smashing Magazine have really outdone themselves with the release of their new book! This book is hands down one of the best web design-related books I have personally read. The amount of information that is covered is outstanding and I would highly recommend this one to anyone that is involved in the web design industry or web development.

December 1st kicks off another year of 24ways! I am super excited to see what they have to offer this year and who has been selected to write the always amazing articles. If you don’t know what 24ways is all about, it’s an advent calendar for web designers/developers that offer articles/tutorials which are released daily for the month of December.

Downtime for me usually occurs around the time I have just finished a project or right before a new project is about to begin. Over the years I have learned that this time is actually very valuable and can be used to improve myself as a web designer. The following are a few suggestions of things that I do to keep myself productive during this time.

I have just finished reading Handcrafted CSS by Dan Cederholm and all I can really say is WOW! As a big fan of Mr. Cederholm’s work, I have read, re-read, and enjoyed all of his books and I had high expectations for his latest release.

Of course, my expectations were blown away and once again Mr. Cederholm hasn’t let us down!

As an advocate of web standards and accessible web design, I recently submitted my application to become a member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers. I strongly believe in building websites that are as accessible to as many users as possible, despite the type of technology being used to view a site.

I do not write about web design industry news or designers. There are plenty of sites out there that supply plenty of web design news along with a plethora of top 10 to 100 lists of everything design related.

Today though I wanted to give back a little something to a few designers that have been outstanding and very helpful recently.

I am a little late in getting this posted due to being away in San Francisco for 6 weeks. In issue #191 (Aug. 2009) of the .net magazine, my website was featured in the Readers’ sites section. I was pretty excited to find out!

I just thought I would share and give big thanks to the .net magazine for a bit of exposure in their awesome magazine.

Over at unmatchedstyle they have put together a small video review of my site. I really appreciate the honest feedback, suggestions, and ideas. It’s really awesome how they took the time to comb over my site and put together a video.

Check out the video review at unmatchedstyle.com

Projects come and projects go. Some are quick and some are never-ending. Some clients want a design to be constructed based on a plan that they have in mind, while others want us as designers to decide the best plan of attack. I think there are both pluses and minuses in either situation and recently I have found that there is a very fine line between which I actually prefer.

I recently submitted my site to be critiqued by the fine folks over at Please Critique Me. After receiving some great feedback from Chris Wallace, I decided to make a couple of updates around here.

While most of the updates this time are mainly visual, I have a few ideas in the works to help clean up my site even more. Stay tuned for a few more tweaks and updates that I will be adding as time permits.