About

about this site

This design blog is an addendum to the design for web handbook. I wrote a short post about the article which prompted the setup of this blog. While I feel that I writing is not my forté ~ I used to have a blog to publish web news as part of my teaching materials. It featured links to inspiring work by designers and developers as well as links to insightful articles. And I even wrote the odd blog post. This new blog is a revival of that idea ~ it will grow and evolve over time.

about me

A quick word about who I am: I’m a designer, educator and artist and I love the web.
When digital arrived in the 90s I expanded my graphic design skills into the then-called ‘multimedia’ field, and into web design. Learning the software popular in the day to do my design work digitally – I soon discovered my love for the web. As a visual designer, I felt I lacked the skills, or brain, to learn coding and—in hindsight—gave up on learning coding way too quickly. Battling with Dreamweaver[1], and GoLive[2], I abandoned this path and learnt Flash[3]. And I loved it! As those of us who were around back in the day will attest ~ there was a plethora of sites created at this time which were beautifully creative and unique. I found this very inspiring and as my work was primarily for bands, musicians and artists, I produced many unusual and weirdly wonderful websites with it.

Then I read THE BOOK: ‘Designing with web standards’[4] by Jeffrey Zeldman[5] which changed how I viewed and understood the web. The web is the one platform where freedom of speech and information is still the intended mission. It was indeed meant for everyone and therefore needed to be accessible ~ which Flash was not, not inherently anyway. I changed direction and buckled down to learn coding after all, thanks to the many wonderful people out there whose work and writing informed my learning. To share their inspiring work, I created a little site, called People of the web. It has the sole purpose of introducing those who teach, share and inspire—a big thank you to them all ツ

These days I take pride in working on inclusive and accessible design projects, happily doing both visual design (for print and screen) and coding with web standards. I now specialise in WordPress and work on amazing projects with my lovely little team. As design tutor, I teach at the Unviversity of Greenwich (on the MA Web Design & Content Planning) and at the University of Sheffield (on the MA Digital Media & Society). While I do take commissions, I create my artwork purely for personal joy – you can find it on terranostra.life, shared primarily on mastodon.art.
Find out what I’m focusing on at the moment.

about the setups of the handbook site and this blog

The handbook site itself is static, i.e. handcoded using HTML and CSS only ~ and yes, on purpose ツ ~ while this little blog runs on WordPress, my favourite CMS [6]. It is an extension to my teaching in some way but also just a place for me to publish bits and pieces relating to design and design for the web.

The reason for using different setups of the site and the blog is mainly to have 2 demos for anyone looking to learn. Keeping the handbook itself as a static site [7] has the benefit of easy upkeep as there is no need for maintenance or updates of any kind. It serves as a demo of the beautiful simplicity of plain HTML as well as a showcase of the growing and evolving power of CSS.

This blog uses a CMS [8] to allow me to easily and quickly add new and timely content. This means I will need to maintain the site via updates and so on but I can make use of the functions WordPress will bring. I’ll go back to the good ol’ days of sharing lists of links to inspire, to offer a RSS[9] feed for easy following of updates and to publish design-related posts on anything else exciting. It will also offer a way to promote updates to the handbook itself over time.

Contact

Please don’t be shy – I’m always happy to hear from people. If there’s anything wrong with this site, or if you have any thoughts or feedback for me, you’re most welcome to get in touch ツ I’d love to hear from you.

Footnotes
  1. Adobe Dreamweaver is a proprietary web development tool from Adobe. It was created by Macromedia in 1997, was acquired by Adobe Systems in 2005.[↩︎]
  2. Adobe GoLive was a WYSIWYG HTML editor and web site management application from Adobe Systems. It was Adobe’s primary HTML editor and was itself discontinued when they acquired Dreamweaver[↩︎]
  3. Flash was a multimedia platform, created in 1996 by Macromedia. It was a proprietary application to create animation and interaction. The result could be published and embedded into a webpage as a single file, viewed with a plugin only. It offered great creative freedom and was influential in the publishing of some excellent designs on the early web. However, it was not readily accessible and had many disadvantages. It came to an end in 2020 when support was stopped by Adobe who had acquired the application years earlier.[↩︎]
  4. ‘Designing with web standards’ is a groundbreaking book which had a significant impact on the field of web design and development, advocating for the use of web standards which was a new concept at the time it was published in 2003[↩︎]
  5. Jeffrey Zeldman is one of the early web standards evangelists, a widely known web designer, author of ‘Designing with web standards’, and co-founder of A List Apart franchise. He is currently Director of Employer Brand at Automattic, Inc. Check out his profile on People of the web.[↩︎]
  6. content management system[↩︎]
  7. a ‘static’ site does not use PHP or a database and is built with simple code: HTML + CSS[↩︎]
  8. content management system = uses a database for content and templates for design[↩︎]
  9. really simple syndication[↩︎]