Redswish - carefully crafted banter

The end of summer

Loosing touch

I sometimes must remind myself that redswish is my personal blog as well as a web design resource. Maybe that’s not the best idea, to combine both. But I wouldn’t post often enough on my personal life to maintain a solely self-centred blog alongside a contributing online design resource. Alas, this is the beauty of the internet in that I can balance both.

I feel like I’ve been lacking the personal touch recently in an order to obtain more traffic, striving to provide solely web-related information and tools in an attempt to coerce new visitors to the site, and indeed to keep current ones interested. But why? I earn no money from this blog, I have no intention to (yet!). I write because I enjoy it, I love getting comments back from readers, regardless of whether they’re positive or negative, and I love it when something I’ve wrote has directly affected someone else. That’s the buzz I get from blogging. So, kind readers, please indulge me while I sum up my summer with little regard for whether you care or not.

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A selection of top CSS showcase sites

A fantastic method of getting your name out and enticing people to your site(s) is to submit them to CSS/website galleries and showcase sites. I’ve done it myself and know several designers who do it religiously every time they redesign or feel that traffic is dropping. Your site won’t get everywhere, some sites are far more strict than others – but providing your design is pretty and well-built, chances are you’ll get some free coverage!

Filling tons of forms in over and over get’s extremely repetitive, so to speed up the process get hold of auto-complete software like Roboform. Enter all your details once and it will fill in the majority of fields for you at the click of a button. Trust me, it’s a godsend.

So, mouse finger twitching, get your tabs ready, set and go!

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I'm a web 2.0 guy in a web 2.0 world!

Being a cool kinda guy, I was sat at home last night and decided to listen back to some of the recordings from last year’s Future of Web Design conference in New York. I know you’re jealous.

Elliot Jay Stocks, a designer I respect (possibly more due to his hair than his skills…) decided to rant about web 2.0 design. How could he commit such a heinous act? Well someone has to, and it may as well come from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.

His ‘beef’ was not regarding the web 2.0 culture and technologies, but the design mindset; that accompanying this explosion of social web interaction and development is a sidelining assumption that to be ‘web 2.0′ you have to show off a glossy navigation bar, reflected logos, banners and badges, beveled edges etc. You all know what I’m talking about. And many of us are guilty – myself included.

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What to do when you get Bloggers Cramp

image courtesy of fountainphoto.com

Every blogger gets it, indeed every writer gets it at some point. Writers/Bloggers cramp. (Can I coin the term ‘bloggers cramp’?)

I get it all the time. In fact it’s often the reason when Redswish hasn’t been updated for a week. Sometimes ideas run dry. For mainstream blogs that attract a lot of visitors, and especially blogs designed as a source of income – this can be crippling. So, there’s 2 main ways to avoid, or solve it.

1. Make the most of the times when the creative juice flows. Build a catalogue of drafts ready to be unleashed whenever you’re away, busy or just can’t think of anything to write about.

2. Get some god darn inspiration. Thanks to a handful of articles and tutorials out there on the net, there are plenty of methods of conjouring up ideas and copy. The most prominent article to have struck me recently is Darren Rowse’s post 24 things to do when stuck for a topic to blog about. Quite a handful of a title I know.

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Which do you prefer – online or offline learning?

My latest post on the Flame blog covers the topic of offline learning (ie books and magazines) vs online tutorials, blogs and sites.

I personally probably prefer offline. Having debated with co-workers, print media seems to take the glory. This is down to a number of factors including a lack of distracting menus, images and adverts, the easier readability, the option to have a book open in front of you while keeping your monitor free, and because your are almost always guaranteed more high quality content from a book.

Check the post out here. And comment where you like!

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Sitepoint books for web designers

I would like to make a toast to the fantastic selection of web design/development oriented books delivered from Sitepoint. I own only a couple myself, the best of which is ‘The Principles of Beautiful Web Design‘, which I must say is a awesome book and reference.

Whether you’re a designer, client-side or server-side developer, project manager, freelancer, hacker, CSS Guru or jack-of-all-trades – you can be assured there’s something for you (how cheesy does that sound.)

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CS4 Ashore!

That’s right folks… if you haven’t heard already, Adobe Photoshop CS4, working name Stonehenge, is in progress. I actually discovered this through a very similar route as others.

I, I mean ‘my friend’, whilst looking on ‘generic torrent site’, accidently searching for Photoshop CS3, stumbled upon CS4. I thought, I mean ‘my friend’ thought, you come across this all the time on torrent sites… false file names to entice people. But it was worth a little research detour.

So apparantly CS4 is in production, which of course makes sense. So far all that’s really known, or has been seen, is a beta loading screen:

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