Thinking

Sometimes, when you've got your sleeves rolled up and your hands deep in the innards of a project, it can be helpful to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. I don't just mean the context of the overall project, but the even wider context of the medium we're working in. For us, that's the web.

Public speaking is something most of us are faced with at some point in our careers, whether it’s running a meeting, presenting to clients, or talking at an industry event. Over the years I’ve met plenty of people who would make amazing speakers, if they could get over their nerves. To help, we've decided to run a half day workshop on public speaking as part of the Brighton Digital Festival.

On Saturday, I ran a workshop for codebar students who would like to build their own portfolio or blog website. It was my first time organising and running a workshop, so it was challenging, but I loved every minute. I also learnt a lot from it.

A few days ago I pushed the button on the 1.0 release of Fractal​, the open-source tool we use to build and document component libraries at Clearleft.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen an increasing number of people using the term “UX strategy”. But Is UX strategy real or imaginary? Is it something you can define and differentiate from other forms of strategy, or is it just a fancy job title to aggrandise yourself, up your day rate, and sell more consultancy hours?

Last week I attended Webvisions Barcelona for the second time - I came away last year with some great inspiration, plenty of food for thought (figuratively and literally) and a few extra freckles, so my expectations this time were high.

Over the past 8 years I’ve seen numerous friends, colleagues and clients—along with many regular UX London attendees—move from design practitioners to design leaders. Some have taken up leadership roles at agencies or small design teams in traditional companies. Others have risen through the ranks of the tech giants to land senior positions at companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

My role at Clearleft is something along the lines of being a technical director. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but it seems to be a way of being involved in front-end development, without necessarily writing much actual code. That’s probably for the best. My colleagues Mark, Graham, and Charlotte are far more efficient at doing that. In return, I do my best to support them and make sure that they’ve got whatever they need (in terms of resources, time, and space) to get on with their work.

I'm still pretty new to public speaking and therefore talk writing, so I'm still figuring out the best techniques. I've only written a couple of talks so far, so I have a long way to go, but the process I've followed feels like a good starting point.

We're trying something new. We used to update you with weeknotes, which served as news from our working week, but we began to feel that they weren't a very enlightening representation of the work we do any more. NDAs and various bits of industry red tape prevented us from really being able to show you exactly what we're up to.

So here we are. We're inviting you to be a fly on the wall at the studio (or some other more glamourous wall-climbing creature). We want to give you a fresh look into the way we work, the things we're learning and other general antics.

I gave the closing talk at the Render conference in Oxford a few weeks back. It was a very smoothly-run event, the spiritual successor to jQuery UK.

In amongst the mix of talks there were a few emerging themes. Animation was covered from a few different angles by Val and Sara. Bruce, Jake, Ola, and I talked about Service Workers and offline functionality. But there were also some differences of opinion.

I have a new role at Clearleft. It's not a full-time role. It's in addition to my existing role of ...um ...whatever it is I do at Clearleft.

Everybody talks about the challenges of running a fast growth business. However slow growing business have their own unique challenges.

Digital channels shouldn't be treated like a second-class citizen when it comes to building a brand identity.

It's been another busy week. So busy in fact that most people were too busy to say what they've been busy doing.

The component/pattern library has proven to be an effective, robust format for delivering documented code and design patterns to our clients. So I thought I'd share a few notes on some lessons I've learned from designing, building and shipping various iterations of this format over the years.