Before I got so into web design, I used to write a lot of music. I’d often churn out about 5 to 10 pieces of music a week. I don’t have a lot of it left, but when I really liked something, I’d print off the sheet music and give it to my school music teacher, Mr Jones. I couldn’t play the piano, so I would ask him to play it through so I could hear it for real.

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A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk at London Web Standards on Web Education. It’s a topic that’s very close to my heart and I’m trying to spread the word about how poor the teaching of web design is in schools.

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The public beta of IE9 comes out in a few days, so this is a good time to check the lovely CSS3 transforms, border-radii and box-shadows you've added to your CSS files are future-proof.

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I was messing around with making buttons in CSS and thought I'd share the code I wrote. I discovered that using an inset shadow gives the button a little glow on the top.

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2 years ago, almost to the day, I left school and registered as a sole trader. I’d been unsuccessful in finding anywhere that would give me a job due to lack of experience, and the recession had just reared its big ugly head.

In that time I’ve built more websites that I can remember, given training courses, spoken at conferences and, possibly the biggest achievement to me, been able to do that most basic thing of buying food and paying the rent without having to borrow any money. (I honestly thought after a few months of freelancing I’d fail miserably and have to move back home with my tail between my legs.)

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On the 19th of May, I gave a talk at Carsonified's Future of Web Design London on Freelancing.

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On Saturday, I decided to build a parallax illusion in the browser, and I've documented how I built it.

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Government and political party websites are some of the worst designed out there, which is a shame because they often have a lot of important information to communicate. Last year we saw how a strong online presence so positively benefited Obama’s campaign and won the inspiration of many young people, an audience the media claims to be disillusioned with politics. I wanted to see how each of the main UK party websites compared, so I’ve done a comparison of the design and code of 4 of them (plus an extra minor party for the lols).

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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.

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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.

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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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