Work

• From Start To Finish

  22nd October 2022

  I’ve been thinking about documenting my workflow for some time so here is a breakdown of how I tend to work these days at the agency. Not every project runs the same and might have more stages or less but this is a rough idea of how it all works. Discovery As a designer, I […]

• Leadership vs Management

  22nd October 2022

  I was reading something on LinkedIn around Leadership and Management not being the same and something hit a chord with me. A couple of years ago I wrote about Leadership and what it meant to me. We did a course at work as a group and it fundamentally changed how I looked at others but […]

• eCommerce design not as easy as you think

  29th July 2022

  As a designer and developer, I always want to push forward new ideas and ways of thinking about design for the web and eCommerce. It’s often put to me that a lot of eCommerce stores look the same and could in essence be selling anything as is the nature of how it looks and more […]

• Exciting personal news

  17th November 2021

  It’s been a while since I posted but it’s update time again with some news. I have a new role. This is my 7th year with the agency and it’s one of the most exciting for me as I manoeuvre into a role that I think fits me well. The tea boy I hear you […]

• The importance of prototyping

  22nd January 2021

  They say a picture tells 1000 words. Well a prototype answers over 1000 questions. I have prototyped for years whether the project needed it or not. Most if not all my work is done in CSS and HTML with a smattering of jQuery. Responsive web design has kind of forced it on to us in […]

• Take me to your leader

  18th May 2020

  Leaders at the moment are very much in the spotlight. As we humans fight the enemy of COVID-19, we look to our leaders for guidance, support and reassurance. Good and bad leaders are very exposed right now and there is no place to hide as the pandemic continues. Over the last few months, we at […]

• New project of sorts

  4th January 2020

  First off, Happy New Year everyone. I hope you had a great holiday and are feeling up for the year ahead. Just a quick post to talk about my new side project based around the topic that I picked up last year and that was print to CSS. I’m going to be designing and building […]

• Line Length

  10th November 2019

  If like me you have looked at many a website over the years, you will have seen sites and often still do where you see large amounts of text that span the entire page width. The problem with this is that is often very hard for the user to read as it’s not legible. It […]

• CSS Grid

  27th October 2019

  If you haven’t noticed already, I’m a big fan of CSS Grid. It’s 100% has changed how I see and build websites these days. Of course, grids have been around for many many years so designing to a grid is nothing new but until recently, we’ve not had the tools to really utilise them to […]

• Anniversaries

  5th September 2019

  This week marks my 4th year at Space48 but also my 9th year as owner of Little Black Cloud my freelance business that I started way back in the day. Of course these days, nothing happens via LBC but I’ve kept it going in honour. Freelance It’s mad looking back 9 years ago and what […]

• My pattern library and designing in the browser thingy

  23rd August 2019

  A year ago, a book changed my life. The book itself was not out yet but I was lucky enough to know the author and over time was able to see first hand what was going into it. The author was Andy Clarke and the book was Art Direction For The Web. It was around […]

• Communication is everything

  7th June 2019

  So I’ve started off with a wanky title, the kind of headline you see on LinkedIn. So this needs to be a good read. So no pressure. I turned 40 last October, I know, I don’t look it. The lowest age someone has guessed is 32 so I will take that. As part of turning […]

• The Good Old Days

  28th November 2018

  If you are of a certain age, you’ll know the struggle of the early days with table layouts and awful browsers. However things were a bit easier as there was no responsive and certainly no debates about CSS in JS. Ah great days. I started out as a web designer and my focus was very […]

• .Net and a design problem – Part 1

  14th September 2018

  A few months back, I was asked by .Net to take part in their design challenge. I was massively stoked to be asked but I decided that it wasn’t a good thing for me as I’d not really done much design at that time due to being solely just a front-end dev and I felt […]

• MageTitans 2015

  9th November 2015

  This weekend just gone, I found myself breaking my no conference rule as I visited Manchester for the MageTitans Magento conference. You could argue that because my employer was behind the event, I should really go but I actually did want to get involved as Magento is becoming a very important part of my life […]

• I Ask You Answer

  7th May 2013

  Just a quick one. I’ve finally resurrected the project I started 3 years ago and moved all the workflow interviews I did recently to there. The plan is to grow this a lot as I think a lot of people have a lot to say and also enjoy reading about others. So yeah, iaskyouanswer.co.uk is […]

• Jumping on the bandwagon

  19th March 2013

  Just a quick one. I’ve finally got to using Git Hub and as of today, I’ve put my HTML framework / templates up for all to mock, suggest improvements and so on. I’m doing this as a personal project but want to try and include a few people who might be able to help out. […]

• I made a website

  9th March 2013

  It’s not a serious website I must stress but I wanted to look at doing something with data and graphs so I came up with the idea of tracking my mood and seeing how my mood changes over time. If you don’t know me, I’m a proper grumpy fucker. I’ve not worked out the data […]

• I ask, you answer

  2nd December 2011

  iaskyouanswer This is a site I designed and built for myself as a side project. Basic premise is I ask designers / developers a set of questions and they answer them. And merge into one website. Goes live in a week or so once the CMS is complete.

• I ask, You answer

  18th November 2011

  Last year, I started a small project doing web designer interviews. The idea was simple. I drew up a list of questions, I asked a few mates and stuck them on my blog. A few weeks into doing it, I was getting some enquiries about doing an interview. Before I knew it, I had over […]