The Web Tools You Know

My recent job change has got me thinking about the tools I choose to do common tasks, and how these can influence customer experience.

The clever amongst you are probably already doing this, but it dawned on me recently when I needed to produce a quick sitemap at work. Read more

Minimal Interactions

Marco Arment wrote recently about overdoing the interface metaphor. You should go and read it for yourself if you haven't already.

The example he uses is the OSX Calculator.app which mimics a real-life object almost exactly. By definition then, it is also not as good as a piece of software designed without those limitations. Read more

Bye Bye Binamic

After almost five years of service I will be leaving Binamic and moving on to pastures new.

Once I had finished sixth form I spent a few months dossing, skating and wasting money. By the end of it I was in desperate need of a job. Read more

Collection

Music gets me through the day. It helps me focus, reduces distractions, allows me to plough through boring tasks and lets me head-bang whilst I code.

Over the years I have amassed a fair collection which is now stored completely digitally and continues to grow as I discover new records. Read more

Now for Internet Explorer

One of the key things I wanted to do when it came to redesigning this site was simple: Have Fun. Luckily, I had a blast, and have ended up with something I am truly proud of. Having fun as a target meant one thing was completely out of the question and that was testing in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Read more

Gigged

This week I had the pleasure of attending two gigs in Camden, London. The first at KOKO and the second at the Electric Ballroom. This meant I was able to see six live acts in total. Each of them put on a great show and what follows is a sort of review and at the very least a collection of thoughts on the noise they all made. Read more

Read52

The other week I posted about the design of this site and the grid I used. I am still pretty proud of that post but was slightly disappointed that I didn't receive any comments or feedback. Read more

Project52 Reboot

This may feel a little familiar. Project52 starts tomorrow. One blog post a week, for a year. It’s going to be tough. Read more

Revealing the Grid

The previous version was a grid driven design. I knew from the outset that Critical Zero would be no different.

I want to delve deeper into the overall design of this site at some point in the near future but first it makes sense to look at the backbone of the design, the grid. Read more

Colour Subtle

I've been a fan of COLOURlovers for a long time now. I'm pretty sure I was around when the idea was first floated on Kirupa, a flash web design forum that I used to frequent when I first started designing for the web.

Since then, I've developed my taste for web design and design in general. I know what I like and I'm pretty quick to make a judgement on whether a site has what it takes to impress me. Read more

Launched

Welcome to the spiritual successor of Critical Web Design. After a long period of silence, Project52 kicked me into gear, and I've been writing here since the start of the year. Read more

Rotation in Processing.js

Dipping into Processing.js to create the abstract background for this site was one of the most exciting parts of this design. Almost the perfect combination of art, programming and play. Processing allows you to get interesting results with a minimum amount of code. Read more

Something

This is the post I should have written last week. Instead I rambled on about what I blogged about five years ago. Read more

Second Post

Gruber linked to something fun; Dan Phiffer takes a look back at some of his favourite bloggers second posts, and then wraps them up as the focus of his second post. Meta. I figure it'll be a fun exercise to take a look at the second post of my existing site and see how things have changed. Read more

One Month

In Twenty Eight days I will be launching this website. I've been working on it locally now since the start of September. The design has gone through around ten iterations and I've only shown it to two other people. Read more