Thinking

With a number of new projects kicking-off, discussion during our weekly design review turned to initial visual design explorations. We looked at some tools and techniques that can help us do this, and we weighed up the pros and cons of each.

Since Clearleft started in 2005, we’ve grown steadily but surely. We’ve spent the vast majority of that time housed by our friends at Lighthouse, moving from their smallest studio to their largest. We love it here, but we’re starting to feel a little cramped, so we felt it was time to strike out on our own and secure a permanent base for our company.

We've been going to SxSW for the last 8 years and have had some great experiences along the way. However could 2013 be our last?

This week was dominated by two big events: the Responsive Day Out, and the launch of Springboard. But that's not all: everyone’s been beavering away on a nice broad range of client work.

Today we launched Springboard, a fast-track programme of design and UX thinking for teams with big ideas but who are short on time or budget. I thought I'd write a quick post to shed some light on the thinking behind it.

It's another busy week… Jeremy's back from Atlanta, and Kate's in NYC, projects are keeping everyone busy, we've been thinking about burgers (a lot!) and Responsive Day Out is less than one week away!!

It's all go with project work this week. We've kicked a couple of new projects off, launched a new thing, the studio's still missing James Box and Jeremy's off to Atlanta to speak at An Event Apart. You know what they say; All work and no play…

Normally the whiteboards in the Clearleft office are monopolised by the designers, but just the other day, the front-end developers laid claim to some wall space for a quick’n’dirty exercise. We wanted to nail down the guiding principles behind our front-end work. All of us have a tacit shared understanding of where our priorities lie, but I thought it would be good to make it explicit.

In his first article as part of our year long residency with The Pastry Box Project, Ben Sauer asks "Have humans ever had to change up what they do as fast and often as we do? Our craft exists in a never-ending state of flux. It won’t settle down for a while, if ever."

Big news this week as we've added another member to the team, kicked off lots of interesting new projects saw the welcome return of the Clearleft movie night.

What do 650 attendees, 10 pin bowling, 9 speakers, 8 Clearlefties, and 2 nights in Nottingham have in common? Join us as we reminisce on the last of the trilogy of New Adventures in Web Design.

In 2011 we started a bit of a tradition at Clearleft: disappearing into the countryside for a week, leaving client work behind, to hack on a brand new project from scratch. We call it Hack Farm. That first Hack Farm resulted in Map Tales, a little service for creating and sharing map-based stories. We had our second annual Hack Farm a couple of months ago.

Performance considerations in responsive design should be a holistic part of the shaping of a site, right from the initial UX work. Using the concept of a 'size budget' can help avoid making it just a development issue that gets tacked on at the end.

A final year student studying Interactive Design at Nottingham Trent University recently asked us some questions about Responsive Web Design. This is our response.

Brasília gives us a lesson about what happens when you design at the wrong level of zoom.

A lot of the discussions I have about our profession end with somebody saying Well it’s all just design really, or it’s just good design and bad design. This is a great way of ending a conversation when you're bored and have a bus to catch. It’s the designer's equivalent of Godwin's law.