Saturday, 31st October, 2009
London to Brighton Veteran Car Run
This weekend sees the return of one of Britain’s longest running motoring events to Brighton. The London to Brighton Veteran Car Run 2009.
The run will start at sun-rise from Hyde Park in London and the first cars should reach Brighton by approximately 10.00am.
What I love about this event is that it both captures and celebrates a particular moment in history: the Emancipation Run of 14 November 1896 which celebrated the passing into law of the Locomotives on the Highway Act, raising the speed limit for ‘light locomotives’ from 4 mph to 14 mph and abolishing the requirement for vehicles to be preceded by a man on foot carrying a red flag. However it also captures and distills a particular period in history, the transition from the Victorian era to the Edwardian era, by only allowing cars built before 1st January 1905 to take part. That fact these cars still exist let alone still run and can make such a long journey brings joy to my heart.
What particularly caught my eye this year is the rather lovely illustration that features prominently on the events website: http://www.lbvcr.com.
The site was built by MSO.net and i can only assume the illustration was done by one of their designers as there are no other credits visible anywhere.
Monday, 26th October, 2009
HTML5, CSS3 and Me
Way back in September I was fortunate enough to be one of a group of front-end developers, designers, coders, project managers and general web pioneers attending the HTML5 and CSS3 Wizardry workshop run by local design consultancy Clearleft as part of the dConstruct 2009 conference.
The day was split into two halves with my good friend Jeremy Keith running us through the new elements being discussed for HTML5 and the ideas behind them in the morning session, and his Clearleft cohorts Richard Rutter and Natalie Downe giving us a heads up on some of the amazing stuff being added to CSS3 in the afternoon.
One of the first things each of them suggested to do was to a) get involved and then b) get playing around with this stuff, as, although not all of it’s currently supported or even decided upon yet, there is no reason not to start introducing elements into sites to enrich the experience of those fortunate people to be running the latest versions of browsers and to pave the way for HTML5’s eventual introduction.
To that end, I’ve found a bit of time to start doing this very thing here on my own site! With the view of adding much more in the future.
More details of what’s been added after the fold.
Okay so first and foremost the site needed to be kicked out of it’s original XHTML1 Strict mode and into HTML5 mode, this is simply done by changing this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
to this:
<!DOCTYPE html>
Simple eh? I know at first glance it seems a little bit arrogant to remove any mention of a dtd, but I like it, it’s lean and clean, it’s basically saying this document is html. period.
Now as I still want this site to be visable to any browser (it is my portfolio after all) I can’t go the whole hog and start adding all the lovely new elements into the page because, surprise surprise, Internet Explorer doesn’t yet support them, and of course there is still that backward compatibility to think about.
Fortunately one of the things Mr Keith suggested was to mark up your code using divs with classes or ids to match the names of these new elements, with a view to switching them out to their proper tags at a later date.
So as you can see by looking at the source of this page, I now have div’s named “header”, “footer”, “nav” and “article”. Also making a welcome return from being depreciated in XHTML1 is the “target” attribute on “a” tags, whilst i appreciated the important of letting people decide to open links in new windows for themselves, in some case you really don’t want them leaving your site so the option to do this once again is most welcome.
So that’s the HTML5 stuff sorted and in. Let’s move onto CSS3.
Well as it happens i’d already been using things like Attribute Selectors and Structural Pseudo-classes to target certain types of input fields and first and last instances of elements without really thinking about them. But the first purely CSS3 styles i’ve now added are the drop shadows on the images that accompany the articles on in this journal (if you have the right browser that is), which are created using the “box-shadow” attribute.
I’ll be adding a lot more CSS3 to this site over the next few months so keep your eyes peeled!
Tuesday, 12th May, 2009
Sketch-a-thon
This weekend I once again had the pleasure of helping out my favourite charity organisation; Draw the World Together run a charity Sketch-a-thon at the Bristol International Comics Expo.
After a long and somewhat eventful car journey with my friend and fellow comic show cohort Stephen Reid we arrived in Bristol and, Clip-board in hand, I spent the rest of the afternoon taking down sketch requests for a team of some of the best comic book artists in the UK.
In total an amazing £696.61 was raised for the charity.
Personally speaking though the weekend was even more of a success as not only did I get to hang out with the likes of Andrew Wildman, David Lloyd, Stephen Baskerville, Lee Bradley, Neil Edwards, Laura Howell, Kat Nicholson, Jason Cardy and Andie Tong but I had an amazing curry in the company of some excellent fellows including Mr Simon Furman AND I finally managed to pin Andie Tong down and get an awesome sketch of Ms Marvel done (which you can see above ^^).
For a more detailed chronological account head over to Stephen’s blog for the full blow by blow.
Tuesday, 14th April, 2009
Back to the Old School
A couple of weeks ago I found myself returning to my roots as a designer, by producing a flyer for a club night, something I haven’t had the pleasure of doing for about 4 years now.
What makes this particular flyer all the more special for me is that not only is it for one of my earliest clients, the DJ collective Knowledge of Self who I’ve been working with for over 11 years now, but that the actual design features flyers from the beginnings of KOS’s personal history, many of which I had a hand in designing and producing.
The night itself takes pace on Sunday 3rd May, 2009 at the Concorde 2, so if you are a fan of Hip-Hop then head on down and break out some moves on the dance floor!
Monday, 23rd March, 2009
Smart Image Resizer
Last week i had the pleasure of implementing this great bit of stand-alone PHP into a clients website:
http://shiftingpixel.com/2008/03/03/smart-image-resizer/
It’s a neat little script and very easy to use. Basically what it does is to resize and crop any image you throw at it on the fly. What this means in real terms is that you only ever have to create one thumbnail image and you can use the same image in different places on your site in a variety of different shapes and sizes!
I would show you some examples but it requires PHP 5.1 and my webserver is only running PHP 4.4.7
(thanks to Mr. Dalton for putting me onto this script)
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