Pixel-, and brain-, friendly grid for 1280×720 HD InDesign documents

As if by magic, you can get a 12 col x 7-row grid of nearly square sections on a 20px gutter/margin layout. Over a 5px under-grid. In an 16:9 ratio HD document. The main sections in the layout grid are… Continue Reading →

A website maintenance page optimised for user experience

What a lovely little thing to add to a downtime message. My favourite online UX course provider added a game of minesweeper to their maintenance page. Took my mind off the wait and informed me when the site was back… Continue Reading →

Alpha Bravo Charlie alphabet for Spanish

Here, below, is a current Spanish radiotelephone/radiophonic spelling alphabet. There’s not an official one to be found – at least nothing up-to-date – so I’ve cobbled one from a couple of sources as well as recent experience. No hay equivalente… Continue Reading →

rsms.me

A Fabulous 21st Century Helvetica Alternative

WP Forms Lite is a spam magnet

I wanted to try a free WordPress contact form plugin. WP Forms Lite seemed very popular – with 5,000 positive reviews. Unfortunately, it comes without any type of spam protection. My contact form was found by the spammers and boy… Continue Reading →

Spaces doing strange things in your HTML? Check your non-printable unicode characters.

A couple of weeks ago we found this strange problem in an email newsletter: random spaces between words – clearly visible in the source code – were disappearing or very narrow in the rendered email. Turns out that, somewhere in… Continue Reading →

Muzzle. Brilliant solution to protect you from yourself when screen-sharing presentations.

Muzzle is your social and chat app notification shusher. Use before you screencast yo’ bad macOS lap|desk-top-self in front of just any old body. It might just save your job.

Simple, reliable local WordPress development on macOS. 2020.

Is *AMP-stack web [design and] build is what you do? [Hacking WordPress!] You need a local dev environment. You need and want your dev environment to be a fuss-free, stable, reliable and long-term partner. The thing about the options I’ve… Continue Reading →

Fat-cat apps on small SSDs

Oh my. Five per cent of my hard drive (8.5 GB) was taken up by Microsoft Office applications. 2GB just for MS Word. Yeowch. Apple’s built-in Notes.app is 16MB. Compare.

How to crop and resize images for the web, without Photoshop, and for free

For a non-pixel-monkey, adjusting a high-resolution stock image for use in a website at a specific pixel size/aspect ratio and to a limited filesize is trickier than it sounds… Three separate functions are required cropping something compositionally decent to the… Continue Reading →

Prettier underline on text links

Funny post about Comic Sans’ing pointless or snarky comments over on CSS tricks. It’s a very amusing idea. However, when looking at the originating article “SNARKY COMMENTS IN COMIC SANS” I noticed their lovely text links. Chrome inspector to hand,… Continue Reading →

Fixing HTTPS on DreamHost with Cloudflare

One solution to fix an ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH error

Keep your lights bright and clean [5000º K clean]

[Update – a kind reader pointed out that using regular Daylight bulbs as I suggest may very well not be good enough. If your work is colour critical you’ll need to control your lighting more and exclusively use proper ISO… Continue Reading →

The CMYK Bible, review and UX hacks

A very handy little CMYK colour guide in 36 pages.

About Pantone Solid Coated vs Uncoated colours and on avoiding Pantone Color Bridge Uncoated swatches

Pantone, Solid as a Rock?

Fix missing Pantone swatches in InDesign/Illustrator

First problem beware the Pantone/Adobe swatch search box! The first thing to check – is the swatch actually missing – or is it just difficult to find*… There’s a long-standing, horrible, horrible bug in the swatch search field. Say, for… Continue Reading →

35mm film digitising with a DSLR

“Well, shake me down with a wobbly tripod.”

Alphabetically sort any text in macOS

Quickly sort any text in macOS. Original info from an old post over at macosxautomation. Maybe a few years old but content still relevant to macOS Mojave (10.14). Only difference is that Services are now “Quick Actions”.

developer.microsoft.com

Official Microsoft VMs for IE8 through IE11 and Edge

CSS animations and performance

Very few CSS animations are cheap in performance terms. Anything that causes the layout process (AKA reflow in Gecko browsers) is bad. The more complex your page the worse the performance hit. But – these four are apparently particularly cheap… Continue Reading →

www.useronboard.com

User onboarding teardowns

macdown.uranusjr.com

MacDown – A very decent, free, Markdown editor for macOS

Desktop browser chrome as responsive Sketch symbols

Cramming designs into the generous default canvases of Sketch* is not always a good idea. Here are four responsive Sketch symbols – Chrome, Firefox and IE on Windows and Chrome on macOS – to further limit your design window. Design… Continue Reading →

Batch setting the correct time and frame number on 35mm scans in Lightroom

Scans of my 35mm film shots always come back from the minilab both numbered in reverse order and with the scan time as the only date. Not in Ordnung. If they all have the same timestamp – then they will order… Continue Reading →

Installing Adobe Creative Suite (CS5) on macOS Sierra

I am actually still using Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5) at home. Recently I’d updated to a more recent iMac and found it impossible to re-instal Design Premium. Was using the official disk image – freshly downloaded from my Adobe account. This… Continue Reading →

helpx.adobe.com

SASS and LESS in Dreamweaver. Nice.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and email

New Europe-wide regulations are arriving in a year or so… This will have enforceable impact on any company sending marketing emails to or within the EU. Enforceable as in these are EU regulations, not directives, and there are potentially very large fines… Continue Reading →

Patternify (for repeating patterns not repeating paternity)

‘Cos I forget where I find these things – and as far as Base64 pattern generators go this one’s a doozy. An old doozy, but a doozy, nevertheless.

Search multiple tags with WordPress

There’s plenty of backend solutions and plugins available – but if you just want to keep it simple; type your known tags into the URL bar with a “+” joining them (don’t forget the “/tag/” part): example.com/tag/cats+dogs/  

litmus.com

Busted email dev myths

Responsive or fluid HTLM5 banners from Adobe Animate

I used Adobe Animate in anger for the first time this week. One key thing I found; if you’re using it to make banners: you really must embed them in an iFrame. Firstly because the Javascript that makes them responsive… Continue Reading →

Oh my word! Gmail finally to support style tags and media queries…

I was such a doubter when I first heard the rumours. Of course it’ll take a while, then throw in the issue android email client fragmentation, but blimey this will make building email a lot easier in the not-too-distant future.

Fixed-up Nikon Nikkor 20mm f2.8 AF

Great success.

WordPress: excluding a category from author.php

(‘cos it took me more than a couple of minutes to find a relevant answer)

HTTP vs HTTPS

HTTPS is a speed demon…

Gmail and efficient CSS? Nah.

It’s not totally clear from the evidence but it seems the gmail team are lumping CSS and media queries together with Javascript and phishing attacks as major concerns. Seems odd but there you go. May explain they’re still killing responsive… Continue Reading →

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