Workflow

• Decline of web craftsmanship

  27th June 2024

  I was thinking back to the old days of a time where I spent a great deal of time creating a design and building it with so much love and care, thinking of every detail and not being scared to try out new ideas. Everything was unique, it felt personal and was a labour of […]

• 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 […]

• Old dog, new tricks

  28th August 2022

  I’ve been a designer on and off over the last 20 years. Some roles were design heavy, some focused on development but I’ll always be a designer at heart. I started out like so many with a copy of Photoshop and Dreamweaver and for years would produce designs made up of layers, text and images, […]

• It’s a 5 minute change

  27th August 2019

  How often have you heard that? It’s only 5 minutes, it won’t take you that long to fix. Well it depends on the fix. Usually text amends or some styling only takes 5 minutes to do according to some whereas in reality, certainly at an agency, it’s a longer timescale mainly due to processes we […]

• 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 […]

• Designing in t’browser

  26th July 2019

  Its a topic that has probably been done to death. Are PSDs dead, is designing in the browser the way to go or is there some middle ground to getting the job done. Over the last 18 or so years that I’ve been doing this job, I’ve flipped opinion quite a bit the more I […]

• Let’s talk about workflow

  14th July 2015

  Workflow is old hat apparently, we sorted it all back in 2014 but I can tell you now, I don’t think we have. I spent a lot of last year talking to a lot of people on iaskyouanswer about it and listening to a lot of people at conferences talk about it. The common thing […]

• My website deconstructed

  21st May 2015

  I’ve recently redone my website.. Nobody cares Dan. No, I’m sure. I’m just wanting to talk about the process I went through as I changed direction a bit and really had a lot of fun…and learnt a it too. Design To begin, I really wanted to bring some character to the site, plus recently, I’d […]

• Automation rekindled my love affair

  14th February 2015

  Last year, I wrote about how automation was killing my love affair. At the time of writing, I was about to move jobs and hadn’t really been doing much Front End Development due to the switch to UX. Looking back at that period, I probably owe automation an apology. I was under the assumption that […]

• Automation is killing my love affair

  2nd September 2014

  I’ve talked about this before and I expect I’ll get the same reaction as I did last time when it comes to the topic of tools and automation. For me, the thrill of the project is sculpting something out of HTML, CSS and JS. Getting deep down and dirty and watching something grow before me. […]

• Working smarter

  29th March 2014

  If you’ve read my blog or my tweets, you’ll know I’m quite keen on workflow. I have this vision in my head and I’m slowly starting to refine how I work or at least want to work either by myself or with others. I’ve spoken to a lot of people about how they go about […]

• Sass

  6th November 2013

  Ok, so most of you will know what Sass is. I’m sure most of you have used it at some point. Some of you may still use it, some may think, what the hell was the fuss. First up, this isn’t a technical post about Sass. I’m old and experienced enough to realise that there […]

• Communication is key

  24th October 2013

  A big part of working on a project in a team whether it be 3 people or 13 is communication. You can have the best designers and devs working on something but if communication breaks down or is none existent from the start, that project is set to struggle often failing. As a front-ender, I’m […]

• Responsive Design Weekly email

  3rd May 2013

  Just a quick note and thank you to both Responsive Design Weekly for featuring the workflow articles in their weekly round up and also a big thank you to those that have taken part. Some truly brilliant answers in there and some food for thought. Good news is that the series hasn’t ended, there will […]

• It’s a matter of workflow

  26th April 2013

  Something a bit different this time around. I’m taking a big interest in how people work. I find it interesting and educational. It also shows that there are many ways to work and we shouldn’t get hung up on whether we are doing it right or wrong. We’ve heard a lot about workflow, responsive web […]

• Page Speeds – Work In Progress

  25th April 2013

  As a front-ender, I should be aware of how quick things are loading on any site I have built / worked on. If I’m openly honest, up until this week, I didn’t take it that seriously unless something major stood out. I work with a chap called Colin who is an advocate of reducing your […]

• Speaking achievement unlocked

  4th March 2013

  You’ll no doubt know that I’ve been up for doing a web talk for a while. It’s part getting over my fear of public speaking and also part of a “talk about your job/ideas in the office” that we’ve all been doing. Anyway today was my time to shine. I spoke about “Browser Led Design” […]

• Browser led design or designing in the browser?

  26th January 2013

  Myself and some good friends were stood in the reception area waiting to get into the New Adventures conference when we got chatting about designing and building a website and we got onto talking about “designing in the browser”. We’d already talked about it on twitter so we knew the camp was divided. Myself, I’m […]

• Writing CSS the right way

  28th October 2012

  Of course, there isn’t a right way to write CSS. It’s all down to preference. Now this isn’t anything life changing or revolutionary so don’t get all upset once finished. It wasn’t until 2006 when I learnt of stylesheets. All I knew of was .style1 and .style2 at the top of every page that I’d […]

• The thirty min routine that makes a massive difference

  16th October 2012

  I’ve started doing something that you probably already do but for me it’s been a revelation. I have been going over the code from the day before first thing in the morning, reviewing it and amending it, often condensing quite a bit. “Newsflash Dan, we’re already doing it!” Good for you. I’ve found that I […]

• A plan of sorts

  3rd January 2012

  This year is all about improving what I have. I made the decision after looking at various jobs advertised online. Sure I can build templates and make them look good but I have holes I want to fill. Starting this week, I began getting to know Javascript. Being able to do some jQuery is fine […]