Al's blog
Assorted thoughts design, development, photography and how to do your best work.
- One way small SaaS products can approach growth
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An easing rule of thumb
Nice simple rules for choosing easing functions when animating on the web from Rach Smith. I have to think about this every time.
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The beauty of concrete
Love this long article explaining why buildings today are drab and simple, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented. A deep dive into craftsmanship and tooling.
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Planet of Lana
This cinematic side-scrolling game
looksis delightful ❤️ -
The 11ty International Symposium on Making Web Sites Real Good
Tuned into the 11ty conference and got re-inspired to sort out my website - added link-type posts and attempting to add webmentions. Such a great bunch of speakers covering some great topics, from IndieWeb to story telling and everything in between. For someone who likes to tinker with code on my website it was so good!
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Nice interactive homepage design from Webflow
I like how interactive the product demos are on the latest webflow homepage - really shows off the product. Even the carousel is done well with times animations. Really polished.
- ProductTank Brighton - A Product Manager's essential toolkit
- Controlling whitespace in 11ty with Nunjucks
- Reusing 11ty listing templates
- Adding a draft mode to 11ty
- Writing for oneself - setting out writing intentions for this blog
- Creating an 11ty blog post using Raycast
- A quest to shoot better portraits
- Case study: Designing a better editing experience for Prezly
- Things I enjoyed in 2022
- How to access post content in template listing files
- NetNewsWire - My RSS reading setup
- 15 lessons learned working remotely for a Product Company
- Better UI design through first principles
- UXCampBrighton March 2022 - UI Design Resources
- When to use uppercase in your designs
- Make clearer calls-to-action with the squint test
- How consistency helps your UI feel more designed
- Achieve consistency using a font superfamily
- Finding good fonts to use in your projects
- 3 tips for using colour in UI design
- Optimising images for the web
- Accessible colour contrast
- When should I use wireframes
- Use fewer borders
- Sharpen up your copy
- Don't use Lorem Ipsum in your wireframes
- Better design through white space
- 5 rules for better typography in UI design
- A better static site blogging workflow with Alfred + Eleventy in 2022
- Setting a timestamp for posts and RSS feeds in eleventy
- Permission to write
- Open source Adobe alternatives
- Creativity in the down times
- Where to blog?
- How to password protect a static site on Vercel, Netlify, or any JAMStack site
- Adding figures with captions to images in markdown with eleventy
- Configure markdown footnotes in eleventy
- Formatting dates nicely in 11ty with Luxon
- Applying frontmatter defaults to a whole folder of posts in eleventy
- Good eleventy resources to get started with
- UX - User experience or user exploitation?
- Make things online as simple as they need to be
- User Research - Interview Question Tips
- User Research - Overview
- 5 principles for a better first draft
- The power of positive feedback
- Daily practice and trusting yourself
- How to become a better designer
- Doomscrolling and the rise of personal blogs, newsletters and podcasts
- On kindness, self and others
- Battle of the text editors - iAWriter and Bear - which should you use?
- Dealing with the dark days
- Show your Work and Keep Going
- Start your work day on cheat mode
- It's OK to fail new year resolutions
- Rediscovering a love of board games
- How to level up your artistic talents
- Building an effective writing and note-taking system using Bear
- Making remote work work
- UXCampBrighton 2019 roundup
- Talk - Giving and receiving design feedback - UXCampBrighton 2019
- Talk - Running Design Discovery workshops
- Using animation for web UI
- Side project - My Next Bus
- Favourite Sketch shortcuts
- Establishing a regular run
- Useful Git commands for (code-savvy) designers
- Eliminating distractions as a generalist
- Dealing with information overload in an always connected world
- Using analytics to make web development decisions
- Making the most of the commute
- Chasing Success
- Effective Wireframes talk - UXBrighton June 2016
- UX Camp Brighton 2016
- What I've been reading and listening to in May
- IKEA sit stand desk - initial thoughts after a few weeks
- Inspiration at Birdie Conf 2014
- Some thoughts on remote working
- Deploy your code the painless way
- Street photography in Soho and Covent Garden with the Fuji X-E1
- Street photography on the southbank with the Fuji XE1
- Musings on implementing a recent responsive design
- Featured in dot net magazine responsive design gallery
- Tips for designing and developing around content in the browser
- Starting out with Street Photography - becoming fearless