Sam Brown

#447 21st November 2011 Link 4 Comments

Frank Chimero’s Do things the long, hard, stupid way talk from the Do Lectures earlier this year really struck a chord with me when I saw the video for the first time last week. I realised I’ve been doing this myself over the past year or so, working harder on solutions to problems than perhaps necessary but with the ultimate goal of accomplishing something great that others will enjoy.

Plus, I could listen to Frank talk and tell stories all day and I’m thoroughly looking forward to his The Shape of Design book.

I’ve been doing things the long, hard, stupid way even more so with my personal work. I redesigned my blog in August of 2010 but never launched it, I’ve been tweaking and tinkering with it ever since then – only until I watched this video last week realising that I was never truly happy with it.

So I burst out the crayons and sketched exactly what I wanted. I then built it completely in code with HTML5 and LESS, only jumping into Photoshop to tweak and align the colours. I have finally created what I believe is the simplest and most elegant solution for what I want from my site. It may have been created over one weekend but it comes with 15 months of realisation and hard work.

#444 8th February 2011 Link 1 Comment

“Each issue will have six substantial, beautifully illustrated feature articles, along with additional rich and unexpected bonuses. Challenging, contemplative, playful, and visionary, the articles focus on bringing a greater depth and maturity to our craft and profession: design on the web.”

Andy has talked passionately about this project for a long time, it is a project I fully support and have backed on Kickstarter. If you are interested in reading more than just tutorials, list posts or inspirational gallery sites, you should back it also. Check out the great video intro too.

Support The Manual by Andy McMillan on Kickstarter →

I absolutely love that The Manual is going to be a print magazine, much like The New Adventures paper was a delight to hold and read I can’t wait for my physical copy.

#440 1st October 2010 Link 5 Comments

Attending Web Design conferences has easily proved to be the one of the best investments into my business. I have shown my face at many of them in the UK over the past 3 or 4 years and it is something I will continue to do and continue to advocate to others. Simply put, these are the only few times each year that people in our industry gather together to meet one another and be inspired by others. Some of the most interesting and in-depth discussions, getting to meet people face to face that you have only known through a 48px square avatar and the continual barrage of light hearted banter are reasons alone.

Over the next 6 months I’ll be attending no less than 4 conferences:

Brooklyn Beta • A friendly web conference in Brooklyn

brooklynbeta.org → 21st-22nd October 2010 in Brooklyn, NY

Build – The hand-crafted web design conference.

buildconf.com → 8th-12th November 2010 in Belfast, UK

New Adventures In Web Design conference

newadventuresconf.com → 20th January 2011 in Nottingham, UK

SXSW – Interactive

sxsw.com/interactive → 11th-15th March 2011 in Austin, TX

My standout conference of last year and one I can not recommend enough is Build Conference in Belfast. One many army Andy McMillan is putting on a weeks worth of fringe events from Exhibitions, a Photowalk and a Pub Quiz to Evening talks from illustrator Jessica Hische and Threadless’ Sean Donohue. Not forgetting of course the actual conference itself with speakers including Dan Cederholm, Frank Chimero and Tim Brown to name a few.

If you plan on attending one over the next 6 months, let it be this one.

#436 13th August 2010 Link Leave a comment

Cameron Moll recently spoke at LessConference on the subject of Good Design vs. Great Design, I would highly recommend setting a couple of hours aside to watch this video. Cameron’s distinctions between Influence and Inspiration I found particularly interesting, where one finds inspiration is probably the question I get asked most, Cameron’s thoughts on this subject (about 30 mins in) are very much worth listening too.

Cameron Moll at LessConference talking about Good Design vs. Great Design →

#434 29th June 2010 Link 5 Comments

This one simple line of CSS can dramatically improve the handling of kerning pairs and ligatures in modern browsers.

text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;

Currently supported in Safari, Webkit & Firefox. Subtle but massively benefical, something I’ve been wanting for a long long time.

More info & examples of Cross-browser kerning-pairs & ligatures →

#433 16th June 2010 Link 3 Comments

Today we have officially launched and opened Endorse to everyone. As previously stated we were still beta testing, fixing bugs and scaling the site but now anybody and everybody can join in and start recommending people today. Thanks to the beta testers for their valuable feedback and thanks to those patient folks waiting to get access.

Have an overflow of job requests and looking to pass on the work to your network? Or are you looking to find a reputable contact who is an expert at a specific skill? Connecting with Endorse allows you to do all that and more…

Thanks to the wonderful folks at Fusion Ads we are now able to sustain the growth and continue to build the site and develop the concept. Definitely look out for a lot of improvements and new features in the near future.

I have forwarded almost a dozen clients looking for people available for work to my Endorse profile this past week and it has been very well received by them:

“Thanks for the links of other good people on endor.se (endor.se is a neat idea).”

“Not a problem, we can appreciate how busy you must get! Thanks a
lot for the list, which is highly appreciated.”

“Thanks for the pointer to endor.se. It looks great and I’ll definitely check out the designers that you recommend.”

Lastly, I have created a couple of simple 16px and 32px icons in the same style as Rogie King’s Social Network Icon Pack should you wish to download and use them to link to your Endorse profile, see my sidebar links as an example. Mike and I hope you continue to find Endorse useful. Thanks.

#429 16th May 2010 Link 3 Comments

It was a year ago this month that I decided to ditch my current time tracking, quoting and invoicing methods for an all-in-one solution. I asked for recommendations on Twitter and did a bit of research myself, Billings from Marketcircle was most recommended and the one I ended up going with.

I’ve been thoroughly satisfied with the product and would definitely recommend it. Marketcircle had a few questions for me that I answered in their most recent Billings Case Study:

Billings Case Study – Sam Brown →

#424 21st April 2010 Link 1 Comment

Occasionally when I am unsure about a concept I am working on I will fire it around a few of my close contacts who are also designers. This kind of feedback is usually of the Yay or Nay variety as we are all very busy and I don’t look for specific or detailed feedback just their general impression. The majority of the feedback I get is from my clients directly.

I have found Dribbble to be a fantastic source of good feedback on design work while it is still a work in progress, hopefully they implement some Privacy Settings soon so I can continue to use the limited and high caliber community as a design soundboard.

Unrequested feedback can be both a positive and negative thing, you have to take it with a pinch of salt – design is subjective and what one person likes might not suit someone else. What I will say though is that if you are giving feedback, make it constructive – “this sucks” or “don’t like it” are useless unless you explain why and how you think it could be improved.

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My opinions on Design Feedback. Read the full article: Design Feedback is Good →

#421 18th March 2010 Link 8 Comments

City Guide is a WordPress theme I designed for the fantastic people at WooThemes.

We’ve developed this theme to cater for directory-based wordpress sites. For example, a guide to a city with shops, restaurants and other places of interest all archived in posts with geo-tags and custom content about the locations.

I was approached by the WooThemes Team late last year to design a new theme for them that was a going to be aimed at a niche market instead of the typical blog and magazine themes. The brief was to design a theme that allows one to best publish listings/ratings of attractions in a city and plot them on a map via the Google Maps API. A location-based directory that anyone can morph into something of their own for their local area, town or city.

It was a fun process working together, there was a lot of freedom and some fantastic concise feedback from the team. While I only provided flat PSD mockups the folks at Woo have done a good job bringing it to life and integrating it into their system for you.

If you fancy getting your hands on a copy of this theme you can get a rather generous 20% discount with the coupon code SAMBROWN for the next 2 weeks. Thanks to Woo.

#417 24th January 2010 Link 6 Comments

John Sutherland a fellow Edinburgh Refresher has written a fantastic little guide on:

How-to register an International Domain Name →

I had been meaning to look into this after seeing Gruber's fantastic http://✪df.ws short URL. Thanks to John's how-to guide I picked up http://ɯɐs.com/. Let me know what you nab.