Just over a week ago I pushed live a teaser page for a pretty massive project I’m currently up to my neck in (in a good way).

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If there is one thing I wish I could convince all my clients of, it’s the value of expertly written copy. But that’s a really hard thing to communicate to a client without it sounding like a direct criticism of their command of the English language.

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This article comes with a serious health warning. So lets get it out of the way: If you install T-Mobile mobile broadband on a Mac running Snow Leopard, you will brick your shiny pride of joy!

Shortly after you install the required T-Mobile Mobile Broadband Manager software (which sucks by the way), things will be very obviously wrong. Certain tools and software will start throwing error messages, you won’t be able to successfully power down, and worst of all, your Mac won’t power back up. You’ll have an iBrick!

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I bought a new font this weekend. I bought Tungsten from the Hoefler & Frere-Jones foundry. It cost me USD $99 – a sum of cash that isn’t going to break the bank, but considering there is a very real chance that I may end up never using the typeface in a commercial, money-making project, it’s not an amount to be sniffed at either.

Tungsten is the latest in only a very small handful of commercial fonts that I have ever bought. Considering I work in the creative industry, I don’t think I’ve bought many fonts at all. But I expect I’ve bought more than many others – especially other web designers.

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A couple of weeks ago I threw together a simple jQuery plugin that provides a character or word counter for any textarea or input field form element.

The plugin’s options allow you to specify whether it counts characters or words, set a maximum character or word limit and choose the direction in which the counter counts (ie, from the maximum count down to zero, or vice versa).

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If you follow me on Twitter you may have read about this last week, but 1st July saw the launch of a website I’ve spent a few months working on: Helping Groups to Grow.

Helping Groups to Grow is a lottery-funded non-profit organisation that supports drug and alcohol misusers through group and one-to-one sessions across Carmarthenshire, Pembrokeshire, Ceredigion and Powys.

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Wednesday 1st July marked a significant milestone for me: one year of self employment.

When I embarked on this journey a year ago, I wasn’t 100% confident I’d make it this far. I didn’t have as much savings as I had planned to have, I wasn’t sure where clients were going to come from, and it was quite clear a recession was just round the corner.

So hear I am, one year older, wiser and slightly fatter. What can I tell you about my experiences?

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If you’re a conscientious web designer or developer who cares about accessibility, then I’m sure you’ve spent the last few years drilling yourself into the habit of using relative font sizes (EMs or percentages) rather than absolute font sizes (pixels – PX)?

Now with the advent of modern browsers and full page zooming (as opposed to just text scaling), I’m sure I’m not the only person that’s been wondering whether we still need to be going through the painstaking task of calculating relative font sizes?

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Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been using ExpressionEngine on a client project. Other than briefly playing with it about a year ago, this is the first time that I’ve really got to grips with ExpressionEngine and deployed it on a live project. So, I thought I’d share some of my initial impressions.

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The days of the ever resourceful all-in-one web designer-come-developer extraordinaire are long gone. In this industry the general consensus is that a great developer doth not a great designer make (and visa-versa).

It’s more common for designers and developers to work side-by-side collaboratively in web design harmony. Or not as the case may be. Designers tend to make developers jobs as fiddly as possible and developers have a knack for screwing up great designs.

It doesn’t have to be that way, here are five tips designers can follow to make developers’ jobs easier and ensure the site turns out as great as you intended.

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