Today, while doing a bit of sorting through old stuff, I stumbled across some pages from notebooks I’d kept during my time at secondary school. The notebooks are part of a series I contributed to with my friends. I think there are about 4 or 5 in total, I have one, my friends have the others. I guess this was my first open source project. Everyone in my small group of friends contributed to them, writing, and sometimes drawing what happened throughout the day.

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If you’re like me, you always feel a twinge of guilt when sending an invoice to a client. It’s not that you feel you’ve done a bad job, you just find it hard to ask for money, especially when it’s in exchange for doing something you enjoy.

Wording the email/letter is difficult. It has to go something along the lines of “Hi, I’ve attached an invoice for x which you have to pay in 14 days. Please.”

Recently, I’ve started adding a few Google Analytics stats to client emails when I’m sending them an invoice for content changes they’ve asked me to make on a site. I feel that I’m giving the client useful information that makes my request for money seem a little less routine, and hope that it shows I care as much about the success of their website as they do.
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I’ve had a few people ask me for the recipe of the chocolate cake I made for the 200th Boagworld. I wasn’t going to post this on my blog because it’s not really about web design, but to justify that, I’ve marked it all up in the (I believe not yet finalised) hrecipe microformat.

Anyway, I hope my mum won’t be too upset that I’ve posted this up here. It’s a family recipe that has been perfected over millennia. Possibly.
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I’ve been looking a lot at the use of colours in physical objects recently. Often you’re asked to work on a site where the brand colours are some hideous combination of yellow and blue or red and green, and you’re expected to make those colours work well together.
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