In fact on the day of the conference itself I was struggling to breathe properly and ended up leaving early, missing the final two speakers entirely. This wasn’t a massive issue for me at the time as I’d seen Andy Clarke speak plenty of times before and had seen Brendan Dawes at last year’s Future of Web Design in London. Plenty of other attendees cite Andy and Brendan as the highlights of the day but I came away with my own highlights from a stack of great speakers.

For me, Greg Wood’s talk on Art Direction and Editorial Design on the web was the one that fascinated me the most. Greg had undertaken a small research study to discover how people engaged with his content in the standard blog template format versus an art directed version with graphics and textual treatments.

His presentation was all about his findings and his inspiration. I wish I could link to the slides from his talk but I’ve yet to locate them. If you visit his website you’ll get the general idea though as he art directs all the articles too. I remember Jason Santa-Maria introducing the approach at @media a few years back. If you’ve got the talent and time to put this kind of effort into your articles then it certainly seems to pay off. I’d not seen Greg speak before, I’m not sure he’s done much of it, but he was entertaining and told a good story.

All the other presentations were of a very high standard. I think I took away at least one useful point from each of them. Colly put on great event that felt intimate, friendly and somehow quite unique and set apart from the the more established industry gigs. It has a little of the vibe of the first, single track @media from 2005. The attention to detail was second to none. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to organise an event of such scale and produce a well considered accompanying newspaper to take away.

Travelling up to Nottingham made a nice change from London. I managed to meet a few new people and catch up with some old faces. I just wish I was in better health at the time so I could make the best out of the day. I got the impression that this wasn’t going to be the first and last such event though. Maybe I’ll see you there next year?

A few years later I guess I became a little more self aware. Who really cared about what I’ve had to say? The posts dropped away and by 2009 they were down to a mere trickle. I lost the passion. Or maybe having a couple of kids wiped the energy. I’m not entirely sure. Recently I read something from Jeremy Keith (I can’t remember exactly what it was) that reminded me that, regardless of the fact that his journal is a massively enlightening read, he really only publishes articles for his own enjoyment.

Wonderful thing catharsis. my brain has a couple of years of jumbled up thinking to pour onto this slate. So, along with a redesign to illustrate my thoroughly up to date web skills, I plan to write the odd article or two about what I’ve learnt, where I’ve been and who I’ve been with. If I don’t, be sure to give me a poke.

Mark illustrates each of his points with a case study from his own vast portfolio and other examples from the web and print. Be it the enormous task of redesigning the Drupal community or the De Standard newspaper websites to the time he spent designing endless tables of printed data in his early career. The book has bags of personality and really does fill a void in my bookcase that has been begging to be filled for some years.

Mark self-published his book and the attention to detail cross the entire process shines through. The enclosed postcards show us that this is the first in a series of five simple steps books and the handwritten compliment slip really added to the whole experience. Even the box it was delivered in showed that ever ounce of the design had been poured over for unending hours. I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

Buy Five Simple Steps, A practical guide to designing for the web direct from Mark Boulton Design LTD for £29 or get the PDF for £12.

Firstly, I’m a web designer, not a developer. Scripting scares me. I’m really out of my comfort zone when I need to bring a web page to life with things like Flash Action Scripting or, in this case, Javascript.

Secondly, I’m a fairly practical kind of bloke who would rather just get something done as a proof of concept and work out how to improve it later. I don’t want to learn a language like PHP or Javascript from the ground-up before I can do something like tab interfaces, resizable boxes and drag and drop widgets. So I never have.

The jQuery User Interface (UI) Library is preceisely the kind of thing that I need in order to rapidly prototype web interfaces. It’s a set of well tested widgets, compatible with all modern browsers (and some old ones).

This book explains in great detail, with full code examples, how to quickly get cracking with every part of the library. This includes tabs, accordions, pop-ups, sliders, date pickers, auto-complete, drag and drop, resizing, selecting, sorting and various animations.

What I most enjoyed about this book was the rapid pace that Wellman moved me through each of the widgets. First he explains the purpose of the widget followed by the default implementation, how to style of ‘skin’ the widget to your own requirements and then onto the more intricate details of chaning how it behaves. This kind of approach is very accessible to me.

As a designer I’m quite interested in making the widgets fit the look and feel of my design. It’s rare that I ever want to use the default style and if it’s not easy to change the chances are I’ll look elsewhere. Each and every jQuery UI widget can be styled to exacting requirments and Wellman is keen to highlight this fact.

I get the feeling I’ll be frequently referring to the chapters on tabs, dialogues, resizing, selecting and sorting the in my day to day work. This is the kind of book you can confidently dip into when you have a specific problem to solve and one that will be a valuable addition to and web design bookshelf.

jQuery UI 1.6 by Dan Wellman is published by Packt Publishing and is £27.99

Read a sample chapter or buy the book direct from Packt Publishing.

Yet javascript opens up a world of exciting behavioural options to us. It enables us to bring our pages to life with all the wizzy and cool stuff that clients love. Things swishing in and out of view, dropping down, sliding, expanding and contracting. Javascript brings our flat designs to life. But it’s difficult. That’s one reason why jQuery was invented — to make life easier for web designers. If you’ve already mastered HTML and CSS then you’ll find jQuery a logical next step. It uses a similar code style to CSS rather than the all out alien language of raw javascript. Learning jQuery 1.3 from Packt Publishing (ISBN 978-1-847196-70-5) is the only book you’ll need to get started with the library if like me you’re a web design who wants to add a little extra umph to your designs.

You’ll realise that this is definitive tome when you see that it contains a glowing foreword by John Resig, the creator of jQuery. He praises the authors, who he knows personally and gives Karl Sedberg a particular thumbs-up for his excellent knack for the English language. Indeed the themes in this book are relayed to the reader in accessible chunks of to-the-point tutorial that will immediately have you eager to boot up your PC and get cracking with showing and hiding, fading, bringing content into the page by the power of AJAX, sorting tables and all manner of glittering delights that were hitherto beyond your mortal reach.

I was in the process of building a new website using the usual solid webstandards that have kept me in work with my current employer for the last seven years when this book landed in my in-tray. One chapter in and I was hooked. My original pretty and functional site was soon awash with plenty of little jQuery effects and goodies. Probably overkill for what was actually needed but once you start playing it becomes pretty difficult to leave alone. Remember when you discovered all those photoshop layer effects? Remember how you used them in earnest way back when? You’re going to do the same again here. But as time goes on you learn to use where appropriate and go throwing everything including the kitchen sink into a design. JQuery is another set of tools to add to your ever expanding web design toolbox and this is the manual.

Learning jQuery 1.3 by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg is published by Packt Publishing (ISBN 978-1-847196-70-5) and has a recommended retail price of £24.99.

Read a sample chapter or buy it direct from Packt Publishing.

What you see here is a skeleton of a site with basic functionality and a so-so basic design. I’ve upgraded WordPress to the most recent version. I was on 2.02 or something like that. Now I’m on 2.6.1 and managed to lose my categories along the way. I think I’ve managed to recover them thanks to some useful advice.

I’m now thinking about how to make use of the WordPress (WP) tags. I always used WP categories before but now I’ve got a bit of a conflict with my taxonomy. Hmm. I’ll see how things go as I write new posts.

Design-wise I’d like to do something different. I want to avoid gradients, drop-shadows and other web2.0 cliches as much as possible (they’ve never featured in a GuyWeb design yet though). I do have something of a penchant for large text though so that particular feature is likely to stay. I always find designing my personal site to be the hardest design to do. Perhaps because it’s such a personal artifact, something that represents me and my work. It’s the essence of the man.

In the past I’ve toyed with hand-drawn illustration, type-writer text and as much organic, grubby real world enhancements as I could cope with to try and make the site feel less computery. But the web is digital however we try to conceal the fact. So for the time being my header contains a throwaway block with a bunch of random blocky fills. I’m going to replace this with something more meaningful later.

The two-column layout is ideally suited to weblogs and I don’t see myself messing with that particular convention. in the past I’ve created homepages that use a different layout from the rest of the site, giving a window onto the delights inside (blog, photos, portfolio, about, cv) but having visited other people’s personal sites I discover that I much prefer to get straight to the content and mosy on from there. So it’s likely that although I’ll be trying to do something a little different, I’ll follow the basic layout of a typical blog. Whatever I do, it will continue to be a flexible, elastic percentage / ems layout.

I’ve decided to use the Blueprint CSS framework to underpin the typography and, more importantly, to reset the browser defaults. I see Blueprint as a rather useful tool and starting point to build upon and that’s what I’m doing.

I’ll also be using the jQuery Javascript library for any behavioral embellishments. I’ve grown to love Javascript through my experiments with jQuery and have used it in a number of professional projects over the last few months. It’ll be nice to use some subtle user-experience enhancing techniques here.

I also intend to use microformats where appropriate. At the moment I’m using the Atom microformat for the posts and POSH markup. I will be adding hcard, hreview and various other useful bits and bobs as I go.

Most importantly in this redesign is to publish some new content! I’ve got a massive list of topics to discuss that I’ve just not gotten round to. I never felt compelled to write whilst my site was so undesigned but once it gets a fresh lick of paint I’ll want to fill it with suitably rich content.

So there you go, a pledge. Subscribe to the RSS feed to find out more.

A full and expanding todo list is available, should you be interested.