Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

reminder to self: take less cat photos.

I found it in an orange book with some kind of pixellated smurf on the cover.

I feel like the blanks have been filled in now, it really is worth getting hold of a copy if you are a web designer or involved in web design projects in any way.

My web design knowledge so far has been gained by example and by being thrown into projects at the deep end, but this book makes you stop and look at the process of designing websites from the ground up. Many of the projects I have worked on in the past, particularly when working for a large fast moving agency (who shall remain nameless as my ex-boss is bound to stumble across this at some point and think it is a slur), started with a graphic design in photoshop, then we used old skool “slice and dice” to deconstruct the design and the used string and gaffer tape to put it back together to masquerade as a web site.

It didn’t help that the team was divided into designers and site builders. The designers, though very good at graphic design, barely knew how to open dreamweaver, let alone use HTML and CSS. The site builders weren’t allowed to do any design. It didn’t work.

I have decided that I will stop evangelizing about using CSS from now on, unless someone pays me to do it in the form of consultancy. I think I am better off attempting to lead by example, (although i’m certainly not a brilliant designer so maybe that won’t work!). I am tempted to list a final rant about the misconception that sites designed and built using web standards all look boring, but I wont. It’s all in the book.

There is a conversation with Jeffrey Zeldman over at Meet the Makers talking mostly about the mythical Designing with web standards, which, being the disciple I am, ordered from Amazon yesterday.

I like that phrase. Taken from a zeldman article "Where have all the designers gone?" on adobe.com.

If I were to blow my own trumpet I would say that this is where I fit into web design these days. As a professional web developer who used to be a web designer I would like to think that I apply quiet design intelligence to websites.

I had a couple of .bat files which I ran under task scheduler. They worked fine for weeks then stopped working, showing a status of “could not start”.

I fixed the problem by resetting the password, which had changed since the tasks were originally set up.

a mate of mine living out in Taiwan is running a competition to design a logo for a cycle component manufacturer

I haven’t blogged anything recently, not because there is nothing going on in my life (quite the opposite in fact), but because the novelty seems to have worn off (with blogging that is, not life).