Stuff and Nonsense

Marco Arment: The One-Person Product

2013-05-20T23:35:22+00:00

More importantly, it gives David, and the rest of Tumblr’s team, the freedom to continue making the best product they can while offloading a lot of the grunt work to Yahoo’s leadership, staff, and infrastructure.

As for me, while I wasn’t a “founder” financially, David was generous with my employee stock options back in the day. I won’t make yacht-and-helicopter money from the acquisition, and I won’t be switching to dedicated day and night iPhones. But as long as I manage investments properly and don’t spend recklessly, Tumblr has given my family a strong safety net and given me the freedom to work on whatever I want. And that’s exactly what I plan to do.

Lovely, genuine and inspiring writing.

I Ask. You Answer

2013-05-20T23:27:38+00:00

Remember me linking to Dan Davies’ series of workflow interviews? Well now this excellent series has a new home at I Ask. You Answer.

★ Flickr: You’re reading. We’re hiring.

2013-05-20T23:05:32+00:00

Cute. Very cute.

★ Unfinished Business episode 19: Would you like a little more Star Trek with your lens flare?

2013-05-20T06:33:01+00:00

While Anna’s away in Amsterdam, I talk with designer Laura Kalbag about Star Trek Into Darkness, how we name our wifi networks and whether location really affects our businesses. We discuss about how to find good sub-contractors and the differences between working for clients direct or via third-parties.

This episode is sponsored by Slide + Stage — become a better presenter with this full-day, intensive masterclass with Aral Balkan. If you’re one of the first twenty people to use our special URL, you’ll get £20 off your ticket price. And by Ghostlab — ‘Synchronized cross-browser and mobile testing taken to the next level.’ If you use the offer code UNFINISHEDBUSINESS, you’ll get 30% off Ghostlab until June 15th.

★ Unfinished Business episode 18: It would’ve been better if they’d heckled

2013-05-15T09:00:55+00:00

In this week’s episode of the nation’s favourite creative business podcast, I tell bad Dad jokes and Anna doesn’t laugh. We answer listeners’ questions about charging expenses and project assets to clients and when it’s appropriate to charge for ‘learning’ time. We talk about making the transition from a steady job to running a new business and why it’s important never to burn bridges, and how to compete with bargain basement website designers.

This episode is sponsored by Perch, the little content management system for projects where you don’t want a big, complex CMS and Ben Frain’s fabulous new book, Sass and Compass for Designers. A big thanks to them both.

★ The CSS Zen Garden at 10

2013-05-07T22:07:18+00:00

I’m struggling to believe it quite frankly, but The CSS Zen Garden was planted ten years ago today. I don’t think we should underestimate the importance of The CSS Zen Garden in the history of the web. Its influence still resonates today. Now it’s back accepting submissions and making some of us feel very old.

Looking back at my submission from December 2004, I feel equal measures of pride and embarrassment. It was ambition fulfilled to be entry number 142 in the gallery but my poor typography and over reliance on image replacement says a lot about how I designed back then.

I was even more proud to have my 3D graphic representation of the CSS Zen Garden’s XHTML structure printed in Dave and Molly’s book. I still keep a (signed) copy of that book on my bookcase next to the Transcending CSS it inspired.

I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see the The CSS Zen Garden make a comeback. I hope it inspires this generation of designers and developers like it inspired me.

Ghostlab

2013-05-07T10:43:54+00:00

Last month I moved off Adobe’s Creative Cloud and back to a ‘boxed’ version of Creative Suite – laughably just in time for Creative Cloud to be the only way to use Adobe applications in the future. One of the casualties of the move was Adobe Edge Inspect, a tool that I have used and liked for testing designs across multiple devices. So today I downloaded Ghostlab and so far it looks promising.

★ Tip: Renaming or moving a shared Dropbox folder

2013-05-07T10:03:55+00:00

On this week’s Unfinished Business, I mentioned how I ask our clients to name our projects’ shared Dropbox folder so that we don’t end up with dozens of folders called ‘redesign’ or ‘stuff-and-nonsense.’ It turns out I needn’t worry as Dropbox lets you move or rename any folder without breaking sharing.

You can rename or move your shared folders just like you would any other folder on your hard drive or via the website. Even if you rename it, the folder will still remain shared. However, changing the name of the shared folder or its location will not change its name or location in the Dropbox of other members.

I did not know that. Thanks to listener Steven for writing to let me know.

★ Unfinished Business episode 17: Beautiful and talented and makes you sick

2013-05-07T09:57:20+00:00

This week on Unfinished Business, Anna and I talk about biscuits and business software. Anna explains how she uses FreeAgent to keep track of her finances and berates me for not trying it. We talk about back-up software and how Stuff and Nonsense use Dropbox to collaborate with clients during projects. I run through my favourite design tools including Gridset and Typecast and no discussion about software would be complete without bemoaning how Adobe are abandoning Fireworks.

This episode is sponsored by 8faces, a limited edition typography magazine, and Handheld, the conference for all things mobile that’s happening in Cardiff, Wales in November 2013. Get 10% off your ticket with the offer code unfinishedbz.

★ Talking about Rock Hammer

2013-05-06T20:18:30+00:00

People seem to like Rock Hammer, our little “curated project library for Hammer For Mac” We designed Rock Hammer to help us here at Stuff and Nonsense design faster using HTML and CSS and we use it every day to do just that. Talking about Rock Hammer, some news:

Hammer For Mac Template Gallery includes Rock Hammer

As .Net magazine reported last week, Hammer for Mac has been given a significant upgrade. Among its many new features are project starter file ‘template,’ something I’ve been looking forward to for a while.

Last November, when I first reviewed Hammer, one of my ‘cons’ was that the only way to change the set of project starter files was to hack into the app’s Package Contents. That was hardly ideal. Thankfully that’s now a thing of the past. Now you can turn any set of project files into a .hammer template and then easily use them to start a new project. I’ve been using the feature in Beta versions for a while and it works just like you’d expect.

Hammer For Mac templates were partly the reason we designed Rock Hammer, so it was great to see Rock Hammer on Hammer For Mac’s new Template Gallery.

Rock Hammer in .Net Magazine

Brad Frost’s written a monster “Top 25 Responsive Design Tools” article that was printed in the June 2013 issue (241) of .Net Magazine. Rock Hammer’s mentioned alongside some other fabulous tools. But I do want to correct something.

Brad mentions that Rock Hammer includes:

Base Sass architecture ✓
Typography ✓
Grid system ✗

Oops. It does’t.

Rock Hammer doesn’t include any form of grid system and I won’t be adding grids anytime soon. The reason? I’ve never been comfortable using a predesigned grid (It’s why I never used 960.gs or Blueprint before it.)

These days we’re lucky to have tools like Gridset. Gridset makes designing and implementing bespoke grids easy so there’s really no reason to choose a grid instead of designing one.