Gradualism

Setting up the London ExpressionEngine meetup

February 28th 2010

A few people have asked me how I went about setting up the ExpressionEngine meetup I’ve been running in London for the last few months. I didn’t quite know what to say at first because I felt like I just stumbled blindly into it. But as time goes on – we’ve just had our 4th meetup – and questions are starting to come up for me, I thought I’d share what I know and maybe gleen some answers from other meetup organisers out there about the areas I’m unsure about.

Gauging interest

This was easy. I asked a handful of people I knew via the ExpressionEngine forums and/or Twitter who are based in London and the South East if they’d be interested. They all said yes so I figured we were good to go.

Photo of everyone looking very serious at our 2nd meetup: (L-R of those facing camera) shapeshed, adamkhan, paulcuth, paulstone and long distance member MarmaladeToday who was visiting from the Welsh Marches.

Read the full article

Why can’t you be more like the internet?

February 21st 2010

Celebrating software as a service, wondering why other products can’t be more like it and enjoying seeing the web’s influence on print design.

I try not to subscribe to newsletters which I’m not going to read but there are a few in which I usually find something interesting or exciting to look at. Two of these appeared in my inbox this week. One from my online accounting application Freeagent and the other from an online shop I buy from occasionally called Nigel’s Eco Store.

Freeagent were writing to announce that they’ve released a new version of the application. I perhaps got a little over-excited about the features they’ve added. But the new functionality includes some things I’d specifically been waiting for, like linking an expense to a project without ‘rebilling’ it (useful if you charge a flat rate). In one way you could say that these features are things that always should have been there, but you know what it is like when you design things for the first time. You don’t always get it right.

Like my kettle. I bought one of these Eco Kettles last year. I was seduced by the promise that you can measure exactly now much water you need to boil. I always found with a regular kettle that I’d boil at least twice as much water as I need and that seems like a big waste of energy. Not to mention the impact on our electricity bill, considering how many cups of tea we make in a week, with 2 of us working from home every day.

Anyway it turns out that although the kettle does indeed let you only boil as little as 200ml water (and is probably saving a tonne of energy), it has some annoying little ‘bugs’: you can never get the last bit of water into the boiling chamber; the lid leaks and its a bit of an effort to push the button down (not such a biggy for me, but for elderly or arthritic users I’d say this is a major usability flaw). And it isn’t particularly attractive now, is it?

Read the full article

Mobilising

February 10th 2010

Following on from my look back at 2009 I wanted to share my plans for 2010. This might seem a bit late to talk about plans for the not-so-new year, but there are some big changes afoot, and I needed a little time to get my own head around them before sharing the news.

Leaving the big smoke

This view is actually one of the good things about our current home & office.

My partner North and I run our own business. It is just the two of us and we work from home. We rarely meet clients in person and when we do, we go to them or meet in town. We like living in Hackney, but we don’t feel like we’re taking advantage of what London has to offer any more.

We’d been thinking we might move out of London in a few years time but then a noisy neighbour moved in next door and ‘broke the camels back’. Having to put up with his loud bassy music for a few hours every afternoon made us sensitive to the rest of the noise surrounding us: the busy road; the live music at the pub opposite; the kids hanging out on the corner with their car stereos cranked up; the list goes on.

So this year we’ve decided to test out the theory that, as self-employed designers of the WWW, we can work from anywhere.

Our test is two-fold.

Read the full article

Reclaim ‘unproductive’ work time by time-tracking

January 22nd 2010

I have been running my own business full time for 2 and a half years now and one of the most difficult things to learn has been how little billable time you actually get done in a day/week. (I was reassured to read this week that the well established designer Jon Hicks is still getting used to this too.)

What I found most frustrating about this situation—aside from the fact that I’d have no bills to send out—was that I didn’t know where my time was going. I would spend 8 hours sat at my desk 5 days in a row and then look at a measley 10 hours of client work logged and think –

“What the hell have I been DOING?”

Then I discovered BubbleTimer. It took me a while to come round to the idea, but I have been now been using this little application for a year. In helping me keep track of what I have been doing, it has prevented me from completely losing my mind (and giving up on my business!).

Read the full article

ExpressionEngine Client Documentation

January 15th 2010

One thing I found out about at this month’s ExpressionEngine meetup is this Client Guide which has generously been shared by Kyle from Headspace Design. They have produced a very nicely designed documentation file for their clients, which they are sharing in PDF format as well as the original InDesign files so that you can brand it and edit it with your client’s own details.

When I made my first EE site I spent a long time writing up a documentation file. It was written in HTML and linked from the “User Guide” link in the Control panel. This covered lots of the items Headspace included in theirs, like how to upload files and marking up your text. Ultimately though, I felt that a system which required such detailed documentation couldn’t be very user friendly, which is why – over time – I built up a must-have collection of extensions and plugins which simplified some of these tasks.

Read the full article

Highs and Lows of 2009

January 10th 2010

I spent the latter part of 2009 thinking what a stinker of a year it had been. Mistakes I’d made to do with estimating the timing on some jobs meant that the summer months were an incredibly stressful time. But in thinking about writing this blog post (and reading yours) I’ve realised there were lots of good things that happened last year too. Let’s start with the positive.

The Good

ExpressionEngine: workshop, development and meetups

It’s been a big year for me and ExpressionEngine, the CMS platform which I started using in 2008 and on which I have now developed over 10 websites. Here are some of the reasons why:

1. I attended Jamie Pittock’s ExpressionEngine workshop at FOWD where I learnt a whole bunch of useful tips and had some major light bulb moments. But I was also reassured that, on the whole, I had been approaching EE development the right way.
2. We launched 5 websites developed in ExpressionEngine. Three of these were designed by us, the other 2 were development-only projects involving other designers/agencies.
3. I started the London ExpressionEngine meetup. We had our first meetup in September when there were about 9 of us. The attendance more than doubled at our 2nd meetup in November. So far it has been a really nice bunch of people – they’re friendly, easy-going and keen to share their knowledge.

Read the full article

Unblocking my blog

January 6th 2010

Photo by Judepics on Flickr So I don’t expect you to have noticed, since you wouldn’t have been here (because there hasn’t been anything much to see) that I haven’t been blogging a whole lot. Despite having a long list of story ‘titles’ and ideas for posts, I seem to be unable to bring myself to actually get any posts written and published.

What’s been stopping me? Well, there is Client Work of course, this is a big one. The last 6 months of 2009 were very intense – it is good to be busy of course, but unfortunately it wasn’t all the good kind of busy (a subject I plan to write about later). And even when it is all good busy, I still think it is important to take sometime out from client work.

Read the full article

Make adding inline images to ExpressionEngine entries safe and easy for your clients

December 15th 2009

Most of the time when I’m setting up a CMS in which site editors can add images to their entries I will give them a specific image field to upload into, and that image will be positioned in the page template wherever I have designed it to go. End of story.

But there is one type of content entry when this just doesn’t cut it. News and Blog entries. The site editor might want to put 1, 2 or 3 images into an entry and they’ll want to position them at the relevant part of the story, in between, or alongside specific paragraphs. And I have got to give them that – it isn’t such a big thing to ask, is it?

Read the full article

Switch Off Your Computer And Go Out And Do Something Less Boring Instead

August 23rd 2009

Working from home, 5 miles from central London, I can get really lazy. I can’t be bothered to go into ‘town’ so I end up missing what is arguably the whole point of living in London. The exhibitions, the galleries, the shows.  It’s usually when a friend comes to visit that I am forced out of my little Hackney bubble to check out whatever it is they fancy seeing. And then I find myself wondering why the hell I don’t do this more often.

So I was pleased when my old art school chum Digger came down from Glasgow recently, cos we went and did some culture.

Read the full article

If @media and FOWD were music festivals which would they be?

July 5th 2009

I was fortunate enough to go to both the FOWD conference and the @media conference this year. I say fortunate because I think you are pretty lucky if you or your employer can afford to pay for (and allow you the time away from your normal duties) 4 days of conferencing in one year (let alone a quarter) – I managed both because I was volunteering at @media, so I only had to pay for FOWD. 

There was quite a striking difference between the 2 conferences this year and I thought I’d share these thoughts here. Please note that I am comparing like for like, so I’m only considering the conference part of FOWD with the @media conference.

Read the full article

Slider / scrubber control on iPod Touch or iPhone music player has disappeared!

June 24th 2009

Just a quick note incase you (too) find that the player control slide or “scrubber” bar on your iTouch/iPhone music player has disappeared, it ain’t broke, it’s just hiding! 

I was so excited about the added feature in the 3.0 Software release that allows you to skip back 30 seconds in a track – especially useful when listening to a podcast and you get interrupted – but then suddenly it wasn’t there. I was half way through a Boagworld podcast when I accidentally hit the skip button. Without the scrubber bar I (thought I) was looking at listening to 30mins all over again (when in fact if you hold down the skip button it does fast forward through the track you are on – another thing I learnt following the link below).

Turns out you have to tap the album cover/artwork to show/hide the scrubber bar. More info about the additional music controls can be found on the Apple site.

Interest and yes, inspiration! at the Future of Web Design conference

May 20th 2009

Having caught my attention with the inclusion of an Expression Engine workshop presented by none other than Jamie Pittock of Erskine Design (one of the first UK companies to use EE on high profile client work), I decided to treat myself to a ticket to the 2 day extravangza that is the Future of Web Design conference and workshops.

I am aware that there has been quite a lot of criticism of FOWD this year that it wasn’t forward looking enough, too much retrospection and not enough looking at cutting edge technology of the future. In some way I have to agree as you’ll see something of this sentiment in my comments on the design presentations. However, in the process of writing these notes and reviewing the experience as a whole, I’ve realised just how much inspiration there was to be gained from many of the speakers. And I know I’ve already referred to all the meeting people and socialising there is to be done in an earlier post, but I can’t emphasise enough how important this is to the whole day. So perhaps it shouldn’t be called “Future of Web Design” but I’m not going to argue over the name: I went to see a selection of presentations about web design and related topics and that is what I got, and they weren’t all bad—as you’ll see from this lengthy article—there was plenty to take note of.

Illustration of an audience member’s contribution to Coudal’s Booking Bands

Read the full article

Why to go and what to do at a web design conference

May 10th 2009

I attended the Future of Web Design conference for the 2nd time last week, I first went in 2007 and since then I’ve been to the @media conference twice and dConstruct once as well.  During this time I’ve learnt a few things about how to make the most of the experience, based on these key points:

• Be there
• Book early
• Choose carefully
• Talk to other attendees (and not just your colleagues!)
• Do talk to presenters, they want to meet people too
• Have questions or comments prepared to ask/share with someone you would like to meet
• Have the right appropriate expectations
• Go to the pre + after parties

Read the full article

Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3

May 10th 2009

“What’s with the name?”

I bought the gradualism domain name in 2007 in order to set up an online home to gather my thoughts about working in the world of web design.  It is now 2009 and I am only just putting this blog live (it has been a single page ‘life-stream’ up until now) so I think that is enough to explain why I chose the name!  I run a small web design business and find it incredibly hard to set aside the time for non-client work like this. I’m hoping to change that, starting now.

This is a test.

So this website is intentionally (or by necessity) minimal right now. The visual design has yet to really be considered – this nice minimal stylesheet was for the most part whipped up by my partner one morning last week. I decided that before I invest a whole bunch of time designing a lovely looking blog, I want to see if I have the content to sustain it.

[…] changes occur, or ought to occur, slowly in the form of gradual steps […]

If I can keep putting blog posts out (and if anyone is reading them) I will look at making this look a lot prettier. Maybe. (It might take another 2 years to get around to it). But hey – noone actually visits blogs anymore do they? We’re all just reading on our feed readers, right?