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The Critters 2013

After winning the .net award two weeks ago, I really wasn’t expecting to win another award. Last night at a fun black tie, storybook-themed ubelly Critters awards, I won Next Big Thing. Like before, I really wasn’t expecting it and made another bad speech, swore a little (I’m sorry!) and almost walked off without having… Read more

Fl*t design trend

I’m about to apply a mute filter to the word “flat” on Twitter. That or start unfollowing a lot of people. What’s flat? There’s an aesthetic “trend” that’s been around for a while. It involves fewer gradients and textures and has thus been described as “flat” design. It’s often described as the opposite of “skeuomorphism,”… Read more

Speaking at Untangle the Web

Nothing quite like a last-minute post… Tonight I’m speaking at Untangle the Web at Google Campus in London. I’m doing a talk on Design Theory for the Web where I do a whistle-stop tour through designing with typography, grids and colour on the web. I also have a stinking cold so I’m going to be… Read more

Web talk dog walk

I walk my dog Oskar every day, no matter what the weather. And usually it’s just him and me. So I’ve got this idea. A “web talk dog walk” where a group of us from the Brighton area can meet on a regular basis (probably fortnightly, maybe monthly) to walk dogs and chat about the… Read more

#define 2013

Next Saturday I’m speaking at #define 2013, a “diversity in computing festival” for 11-13 year old students who wouldn’t usually consider careers in computing. It’s an event aimed at improving diversity in computing and I’m really proud to be speaking. I’m going to talk about a day in the life of a web designer/developer in… Read more

.net awards 2013

Last Friday, this happened. I really didn’t expect it; I tripped over on the way up to the stage and mumbled through a thank you while the microphone was mostly switched off. Despite being clumsy and totally inarticulate, I was delighted. It didn’t just make my day, it made my year :)

Guest co-host on Unfinished Business II

Last Friday I was a guest co-host on Unfinished Business again. It was great fun, Andy and I spoke about clients, how location affects our businesses, how to find good subcontractors and Star Trek. I’m a massive fan of Unfinished Business and listen to every episode so it was a real treat to go back… Read more

Mentoring a project: contract and kicking off

Previous posts on the mentoring project: Mentoring a project: the idea Mentoring a project: the right project Mentoring a project: finding the right people Mentoring a project: the project It’s been far too long since I wrote about the mentoring project. I’ve been incredibly busy and really needed to dedicate more time to make it… Read more

Psychology for designers

This week I went all out and bought all the currently-released Five Simple Steps Pocket Guide digital books. I say “went all out”, they’re an absolute bargain at £6 for a collection of four, or £2 per book. Reading this book thoroughly, following the links in the text, took me about an hour. I’m a… Read more

Learning to speak

Just over a year ago, I was in a country I’d never visited, about to give two talks I’d never given before to two large, paying audiences in the space of three days at Future Insights Live. I had only given a couple of talks to small audiences before. It was one of the scariest… Read more

Responsive Day Out

A month ago I spoke at Responsive Day Out, an “affordable, enjoyable gathering of UK designers and developers sharing their workflow strategies, techniques, and experiences with responsive web design.” As I said to Jeremy Keith when he first asked me if I wanted to do it, this would be a day I couldn’t possibly miss,… Read more

Guest co-host on Unfinished Business

Last week I was guest co-host on one of my most favourite podcasts, Unfinished Business. It was great to ramble and rant with Andy for 90 minutes as it’s not often I get to chat for so long to another designer whose main focus is client work. We talked about smoking chimps, mentoring and how… Read more

Alfred App v2 theme

Today I finally got around to playing with Alfred v2. This is the one OSX app I’ll allow to open on login, I use it to launch every app and find every file. I use it to work out maths for my CSS and double-check the meanings of words I’m about to write. And it… Read more

Speaking at Breaking Borders

Next month I’m speaking at Breaking Borders. Breaking Borders is a brand new, totally free, bi-monthly event in Reading organised by my good friend, Ben MacGowan. The inaugural Breaking Borders event will have the lovely Steve Workman speaking about Front-end web architectures that won’t bite you (in the ass) and me speaking about design systems.… Read more

Ladies In Tech

A while ago, Jeremy Keith introduced me to ladiesintech.com, suggesting that it might be something that’d interest me. After having a chat with the lovely Jenn Lukas over email, I had a story that I wanted to share about my adventures in speaking, and Jenn has now helped me share it on the site. This… Read more

Interviewed on The Industry

Last week I had a chat with the lovely Conor O’Driscoll and last night he published the interview on The Industry. We talking about design work, education and what I define as success, among other things.

Burnout

Burnout. Spending hours just staring into space when you’re supposed to be doing work, when you want to be doing work. Feeling foggy-headed and grey the whole time when you usually feel eager and excitable. Menial tasks are just about manageable, but anything requiring careful consideration or creative thinking feels impossible. I sleep but I… Read more

Mentoring a project: the project

Previous posts on the mentoring project: Mentoring a project: the idea Mentoring a project: the right project Mentoring a project: finding the right people In the previous posts, I mentioned that I was going to explain the details of the project later on. This was because I didn’t want to get bogged down by the… Read more

WP Cycling Project

Something a bit different I do quite a bit of work with the lovely people at Code For The People. They do WordPress in a big way. And I love WordPress, I love that something open source has become so big, and I love how it’s not run by a big evil corporation (like most… Read more

Upfront Podcast

I was a guest on the Upfront podcast with the lovely Jack Franklin and Ben Howdle. They got me on to talk about accessibility, but we ended up chatting about the mentoring project too! You can listen on their website, or listen and subscribe on iTunes.

Design Feast Designer’s Quest(ionnaire)

Design Feast have my answers to their Designer’s Quest(ionnaire) on their site. Scroll past the scarily large photo of me quickly… their questions prompted me to think about some interesting points, especially challenges for designers: What are some of the challenges you encounter as a designer and how do you deal with them? I think… Read more

The East Wing podcast

Yesterday I was a guest on Tim Smith‘s The East Wing podcast. It was a pre-recorded conversation and it was great fun. You can listen to it on the East Wing website, and it’ll be up on iTunes soon. We discussed how I got started in the industry (really sorry traditional Graphic Design people, I… Read more

Women and conferences

I used to not understand the fuss around women at conferences, I thought that we should all just carry on with what we were doing well already and not get caught up in needless controversy. I even wrote a blog post saying exactly that a couple of years ago. I’d never experienced (to my knowledge)… Read more

The Sharers on The Branch

I’ve written a post over on The Branch. James Dinsdale emailed me about a new project he was starting out, called The Branch, a site collecting posts about what inspires people. I love these kinds of posts, so I was really keen to be involved. As a designer, inspiration is a much-discussed topic. Unfortunately, this… Read more

A loveletter

Note: I wrote this a while ago when I was thinking about the things that made me want to work on the web. Of course, it’s not exclusively women that inspire me, but as a girl who continually questions the value she is bringing to a project, I often find the women of the web… Read more

New To Design

Following my learning design post, I’ve started a little project called “new to design.” At the moment it just consists of a learn-design tag on my Pinboard bookmarks and a Twitter account @newtodesign so that I can share useful design resources (especially for those new to design.) In the future, I hope it can be… Read more

Grid Frameworks and why I’m not keen on them…

I’ve written a post for 12 Devs of Xmas on Grid Frameworks. After spending months whining about grid frameworks, 960.gs and Bootstrap, I’ve finally backed up my tweet-sized complaints with some context and examples. I knew it would be contentious and that some people would feel antagonised by my saying that developers who don’t consider… Read more

My 2012

2012 has been a massive year for me. It was a year of saying yes to things that scared me. It was the first time I spoke at a conference (and I went on to speak at a further seven events.) I found the first house I’ve lived in by myself. I travelled to as… Read more

Learning Design

Every now and again someone will email me asking how they should go about learning design. After reading Aral Balkan’s fantastic post on how design is not veneer, a few developers also expressed frustration at there not being many resources telling you how to get started with design. So I thought I’d post a few… Read more

Sass for Designers — The Setup

As an accompaniment to my post on Sass for Designers (why and how you should use Sass) I thought I’d better include a quick writeup on my setup for working with Sass in the hope that it’ll help you get started. I’m afraid I work on a OS X, so my instructions will only be… Read more

Sass for Designers

Despite saying that I wanted to avoid writing post about development, I wanted to write something about Sass. Excuse me, what is Sass? Sass is a CSS pre-processing language; it’s a slightly different way of writing CSS which can then be processed by a tool that spits out fully-working CSS. It’s like a kind of… Read more

We read with our own contexts

Oh Twitter. Yesterday was another day where I accidentally incited another riot with a poorly-worded tweet. Nobody is perfect, but it’s starting to happen with alarming frequency, and I wanted to understand why I keep doing this. The ever-present ego We read everything through our own ego filter. It’s how we apply new knowledge to… Read more

Bardowl: The Big One

For the last few years, I’ve been working with a great team of people on our iPhone app, Bardowl, an app for streaming unlimited audiobooks for £9.99 a month (think Spotify but for audiobooks.) It’s not been a quick and easy. Getting publishers to come round to the idea, and securing good audiobooks, has been… Read more

Reinvention and Building Ourselves — Build 2012

I’ve posted a writeup of Build conference 2012 on ubelly. Oddly, I’ve not found any other writeups from Build, which may be because (as I mention in my post) the talks weren’t those sound-bite talks that give quick take away tips. If anyone does come across any, please point me in the right direction as… Read more

Insites Xmas Special—Integrity and Polarity

Yesterday was Insites: The Xmas Special, a brilliant event put on by the lovely Keir Whitaker and Elliot Jay Stocks. After being well fed, everybody in the room gave a six minute(ish) talk about something they’ve learned in 2012. It was a personal, open and incredibly meaningful set of talks. There were no slides, and… Read more

display: none;

Or The things you think are common knowledge but really they aren’t. I was on the ShopTalk show a few weeks ago, and a few people have asked me what I meant when I said “display: none; naughties.” I foolishly thought that people would understand what I meant, (and I’ll come to that later) so I… Read more

SMACSS – Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS

I bought Jonathan Snook’s Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS five months ago and, embarrassingly, I’ve only just read it. As a “flexible guide to developing sites small and large”, it’s fantastic. Last month I was lucky enough to see Jonathan speak about State-Based Design (a concept which he covers in SMACSS) at the FromTheFront conference… Read more

CreativeJS for non-coders workshop with Seb Lee-Delisle

Programming block I’m a bit scared of JavaScript. Since I started learning front-end development about seven years ago, I’ve pretty much stayed away from it. That aside from some pretty dodgy jQuery where I can usually bodge something together but would never rely on it. I’ve always said it’s because I wanted to be really… Read more

Grids, flexibility and responsiveness

First steps: choosing a typeface The first step in my grid design was to choose an appropriate typeface. I knew this would be everything on such a text-heavy site, and I really struggled because, as with all the elements on my personal site, I wanted it to reflect “me”. I wanted a typeface that felt… Read more

Really, a redesign? This can’t be real…

It’s about time… So finally I’ve redesigned my website. It’s been about three and a half years since the last version of laurakalbag.com (still around at http://2009.laurakalbag.com) and that’s a site I designed before I finished university, before I even started freelancing full time. To be fair, it took a while for me to hate… Read more

Typography and the web at Ampersand Conference

I’ve written a big old writeup for ubelly from my notes at Ampersand conference earlier in the month. This was an event I decided not to live-tweet, as the content is usually more involved and in-depth, making for a better big writeup and less tweetable quotes. Typography and the web at Ampersand conference

Will understanding the mainstream affect me as a designer?

I’ve been contemplating how designers can identify better with more mainstream users. I had a thought last week. What if, by rejecting Facebook, I’m actually missing out on design patterns that are so influential on the mainstream user that it affects their perception on the rest of the web? And the same goes for Google… Read more

Critiques, giving and receiving useful feedback

Funnily enough, a couple of days before Mark Boulton said and wrote his piece on design critiques, I’d been thinking about that same topic. I’ve been struggling through an iPhone app icon design, and had asked Twitter for help. Knowing that the 160 character limit wasn’t going to help me much, I emailed everyone who… Read more

Solving problems with naïvety

Last week I was at the wonderful Future Insights Live conference in Las Vegas. Annoyingly as I was speaking twice (that bit wasn’t annoying, it was fun!) I missed a load of talks, but had some fantastic discussions around some particularly interesting topics. The topic of naïvety in user experience first came up in Aral… Read more

Mobile First

Continuing on with my chapter-a-day, last week I finished reading the brilliant Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski. Mobile design and development has gained momentum over the last few years; with responsive design and designers regularly going giddy over iPhone app UIs, it’s surprising how little the industry discusses the design issues. We seem to prefer to… Read more

A Practical Guide to Designing the invisible

After reading Mark Boulton’s A Practical Guide to Designing For The Web and Andy Clarke’s Hardboiled Web Design, I was keen to read another Five Simple Steps’ design book. Robert Mills’ A Practical Guide to Designing the invisible definitely didn’t disappoint. It took me a few reads to start getting into it. I haven’t been dedicating… Read more

dConstruct 2011 — My Digest

It was another inspiring day at dConstruct, the best abstract thought-inducing conference around. The abstract nature of the conference is part of the appeal for most people. It’s hard to get enthusiastic about a talk that is teaching you more practical techniques, such as writing HTML, when you can so easily learn about it on… Read more

Insites Tour Brighton

Insites is a mini tour of four cities in the UK where Keir Whitaker and Elliot Jay Stocks present discussions with well-known people from the web/tech industry. I was lucky enough to go to the first evening in Brighton on Monday where Aral Balkan, Sarah Parmenter and Jeremy Keith were the guests. The Format The… Read more

Responsive Web Design

I had ordered Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte as soon as it came out, but being at Ampersand conference, and hearing so many people recommend it, really spurred me to take a few hours out to get on and read it. Responsive web design is a term summarising design that has a flexibility allowing it… Read more

Notes from Ampersand conference — My Digest

I’ve tried to condense my notes from Ampersand conference into a more useful digest. More than anything this, like my live-tweeting at past conferences, is really a selfish activity to help me absorb the ideas from Ampersand better by reflecting on the themes of the day. And of course in the spirit of the web… Read more

Notes from Ampersand conference — Actual Notes

For those who wanted my notes in an undigested, scatterbrained form, here’s images from my notebook. (My digest is available too.) I’m a mind-mapping fiend, so I try to link with arrows where I can. Where new points were begun I just moved to another space on the page, so forgive the random appearance! There’s… Read more

Labels in input fields aren’t such a good idea

There’s something that’s been bothering me lately. It seems to be some kind of form interface trend where the labels for text inputs are placed inside the fields themselves. Example: There might be some pros Admittedly, this makes an interface slicker. It saves space where you’d usually have a label, then some padding, then the… Read more

Future Of Web Design 2011 – The Summary – Day Two

Day Two Ethan Marcotte – Responsive Web Design Femi T Adesina – Enhancing your Creativity I mis-hastagged the first tweet! Josh Clark – Buttons Are a Hack: The New Rules of Designing for Touch My thoughts at this point: Josh Clark – Buttons Are a Hack: The New Rules of Designing for Touch continued… John… Read more

Future Of Web Design 2011 – The Summary – Day One

A few people have recommended that I post all the tweets summarising the great talks at Future Of Web Design in a blog post. So here it is! Day One Aarron Walter - Transforming Ideas into Interfaces I arrived late for Aarron’s talk so it took me a while to engage properly. Mike Kus – Designing… Read more

Future Of Web Design 2011 – The Review

Another great event from Carsonified, I really enjoyed Future Of Web Design this year. The Cost I was actually really lucky to get a ticket. I seriously couldn’t afford the £714 2-day conference pass, even at the super early bird rate (that was about £200 less, I can’t remember exactly.) My lovely friend Scott Coello… Read more

Notebooks and Getting Over Moleskine

I’m a notebook and sketchbook-aholic. Actually I’m addicted to stationery of any kind. Pens, pencils, post-it notes. It’s incredibly easy to convince myself I need these items when I mostly don’t. Notebooks and sketchbooks (and maybe some nice accompanying pens), however, are an absolutely vital part of my working life. Why bother with physical notebooks?… Read more

The Big M

First off, let me declare my complete bias. I’ve been involved with the Big M conference from pretty early on, I was lucky enough to do all the design work and the organisers are lovely guys who I’m proud to call my friends. I’m still on a high from how much I enjoyed myself (and… Read more

Who wants a ticket for The Big M?

I don’t know if you know, but I made the website for the upcoming super exciting mobile conference, The Big M. As a result, I have 3 conference tickets worth £233.83 to give away to lovely people who want to learn more about mobile (covering topics such as innovation, usability, development, apps and mobile web.)… Read more

Women in…

I’ve changed my mind about this subject! To read about why and how I don’t believe this anymore, please read Women and conferences. Business…Tech…Conferences… Every time I hear these dreaded phrases, “Women in business”, “Women in tech”, “Women at conferences” I just groan. It’s really boring. Examples. “There’s only x% of women at this conference”… Read more

New Adventures 2011

Conferences are my social life As I go to more conferences, I meet more lovely people and get to see friends I’d only ever talk to on Twitter otherwise. In the last two years, I’ve been to about three a year and it feels about the right amount that you rarely see the same talk… Read more

Hardboiled Web Design and Transcending CSS

My history with Transcending CSS In 2006/early 2007 I read this amazing book. I was half way through my first year studying Digital Design, and I’d only been experimenting with standards-based web design for about six months after reading Web Standards Solutions. I was already well on my way to being a standards fiend, but… Read more

Design work is 50% visual, 50% justification

After I finished my last post about Design Tips for Developers, it really struck me how much I wrote to justify my design. I wasn’t just writing tips saying ”do this, it’s good“, ”don’t do this, it’s bad.” I put time and effort into explaining why I made these decisions and why I didn’t do it another way.… Read more

Design Tips For Developers

This little post is based around the talk I gave at Bathcamp. Rich Quick came up with the great idea that, whilst Bathcamp attendees are mostly developers, a talk on design for developers was probably appropriate. And you might have seen on my post from last week, I was looking for a case study to… Read more

Bathcamp plea for bad designs by developers

I’ve got a talk for Bathcamp 2010 in the works! Thanks to the ever-helpful Rich Quick for the idea, I’m going to do a talk on Design Tips for Developers. However, alongside a bit of time, effort and available slot on the day, this is subject to some help from a kind developer. I’m looking… Read more

Stuck on a design

After discussing Dribbble and Forrst, and my latest post that looked at criticism in design, I’ve been thinking a lot more about how feedback features in my design process. Getting stuck When I used to get stuck on a design, from ‘creative block’ or a complete lack of inspiration, I would frantically brainstorm, then browse… Read more

Good old designer snobbery is alive and kicking

There’s one thing that I hate about being a designer and that’s the snobbery. Most, if not all, designers are a little bit guilty of looking down on other people’s work. Comments such as “Pah! They used Comic Sans” or “Ergh! Don’t they know reflections are so out of date now?” These are comments I’m… Read more

Using Dribbble and Forrst for feedback on a client project

A couple of weeks ago I created a quickie logo for Andy Warburton’s mobile stock photography service Stockyoo. Andy was really keen on the idea of using Forrst and Dribbble for posting the progress of the project to get the opinions of potential users of a stock photography service and do some early promo for… Read more

dConstruct 2010

I was a bit skeptical about dConstruct at first. The idea of a conference based on ‘creativity and ideas’ made me worry it might be a bit pretentious but I was convinced by a lot of friends on Twitter that it’d be worthwhile, and they were so right. I went with a notebook and an… Read more

Me vs We

There’s something that’s been niggling at me for ages. The way people act as if they’re a multi-person company when they’re really just one individual. This whole ‘we’ syndrome. We have a great new client now working with us at Just Little Old Me Ltd. Sometimes it makes me giggle when I know somebody is… Read more

Year One

It’s been a whole year since I officially started working as a freelance designer last August. I graduated from uni, had a brief fling with some full-time remote working, had an awkward interview with a recruiter and then decided that I’d rather give it a go by myself. Getting Started I felt pretty ready for freelancing… Read more

Girlguides UK Anti-airbrushing Campaign

I don’t like to say it, but I think the Girlguides UK campaign (#gukforrealimages) call for labelling all airbrushed images of women is unrealistic. Our girls and young women are demanding action from the Prime Minister to introduce compulsory labelling to distinguish between airbrushed and natural imagesin order to ‘shape a generation of self-confident girls and… Read more

WordPress 3.0 Part 3—Theme Development and the Design

This post has three parts. This is part three. Visit the other parts below: Part 1: WordPress 3.0—Pre 3.0 and Beyond Part 2: WordPress 3.0—Really WordPress 3.0 Easier for theme developers to make it easy for users The following WordPress 3.0 features really make it easier for the big-time theme developers who create highly customisable themes.… Read more

WordPress 3.0 Part 2—Really WordPress 3.0

This post has three parts. This is part two. Visit the other parts below: Part 1: WordPress 3.0—Pre 3.0 and Beyond Part 3: WordPress 3.0—Theme Development and the Design Really WordPress 3.0 Custom Post Types Custom Post Types are my new best friends. I have used new post types on every client project since the… Read more

WordPress 3.0 Part 1—Pre 3.0 and Beyond

This post has three parts. This is part one. Visit the other parts below: Part 2: WordPress 3.0—Really WordPress 3.0 Part 3: WordPress 3.0—Theme Development and the Design I’m a big fat WordPress fan. I love the people behind it, I love the ethicsand I love how it makes it easy for me to make… Read more

HTML5 For Web Designers

Even though the specification for HTML5 isn’t yet complete, those of us who are a bit eager to get into it now have the perfect book to get us started. HTML5 For Web Designers by Jeremy Keith is the first offering from A Book Apart. It’s a very easy read, not an endless reference, which… Read more

Zootool — The best and most beautiful tool for storing inspiration

Since I started using Zootool in March I’ve been totally addicted. I’d been looking for a scrapbook-style app, to stash all the inspiration I find, for a while. On cool sites like Dribbble, Drawar, FFFFound and all over the web, I’m always finding pretty things I’d like to keep and use when I’m designing later… Read more

Promises

Well, I’ve got a blog. This is not a promise, but I will attempt to post some stuff focussing on quality over quantity. I’m thinking some of the more useful resources I come across; probably lots on WordPress, maybe a bit on mobile design, I’ve got a rant about HTML brewing somewhere too. I apologise… Read more