Thinking

I wrote a thing. The thing is a book. But the book is not published on paper. This book is on the web. It’s a web book. Or “wook” if you prefer …please don’t prefer. Here it is:

​It’s been another busy year conference-wise here at Clearleft. But that’s certainly not an excuse to rest on our laurels. No indeed. We’ve been working away behind the scenes and our 2017 events calendar is shaping up nicely - first up to announce is UX London 2017.

24 Ways is back! That’s how we web nerds know that the Christmas season is here. It kicked off this year with a most excellent bit of hardware hacking from Seb: Internet of Stranger Things.

In a post called Side Effects in CSS that he wrote a while back, Philip Walton talks about different kinds of challenges in writing CSS:

Every front-end developer at Clearleft went to FFConf last Friday: me, Mark, Graham, Charlotte, and Danielle. We weren’t about to pass up the opportunity to attend a world-class dev conference right here in our home base of Brighton.

I spoke at the GOTO conference in Berlin this week. It was the final outing of a talk I’ve been giving for about a year now called Resilience.

Email newsletters are having quite the renaissance right now. We figured we'd throw our hat into the ring and introduce Clearletter.

In my previous article, I wrote about some of the misconceptions with “agile” that I see in organisations. This article will focus on one of them specifically – the common (mis)understanding that agile—and more recently lean start-up methods—are seen as operational and tactical, rather than strategic. Where does the confusion comes from? In particular, I want to acknowledge the role that the person who leads the project operations plays in realising the product vision and creating a context for the team to succeed. That person could be a Scrum Master, or an Agile Project Manager, or a Delivery Manager, depending on the context.

For the longest time I’ve maintained that Service Design was a specific discipline, distinct from UX Design. It’s true that they have a lot in common, like the way both fields approach problems through a user-centred lens. They also use many of the same tools, such as design games and personas. Even some of their distinctive tools, like the service delivery blueprint have similarities with our own user journey maps. But if you spent any time with a credible Service Design agency five or ten years ago, you’d easily spot the differences.

Thanks to progressive enhancement we can use lots of awesome CSS features right now, even though not everyone uses a browser which supports them.

I’d like to address some of the top challenges that I see people face with implementing a culture of agile philosophy in our industry. I am an Operations person. I call it Operations because of the huge amount of grief associated with the various guises of project management (project manager, program manager, ScrumMaster, Agile Coach and many more), largely due to the behaviours exhibited when this role goes wrong.

September is a busy time for events. Here in Brighton, there's the Digital Festival, packed full of events for the whole month. Many of those events will be happening right here at our 68 Middle Street event space.

Jason shared some thoughts on designing progressive web apps. One of the things he’s pondering is how much you should try make your web-based offering look and feel like a native app.

It’s the end of the day and the orange street lights are coming on. Tucked between the skyscrapers of London’s Liverpool Street station there’s a terraced house, no more than 4 storeys high, a rich smell of wood smoke, and baked bread. Candles flickering in the window.

Scissors open on the table. Seven empty coffee cups. Ripped up magazines. A wall full of colourful images and wild ideas on post-it notes. It's been a creative day.

A content strategist, a UXer and a designer have been finding their way to that place where imagery collides with language and creates a special kind of chemical reaction.

Are designers evolving from just UX designers or just visual designers into multi-disciplinary generalists? There seems to be higher-quality design all-rounders coming back into vogue.