Latest Posts

  • Anatomy of a Redesign – Path to CSS Grid Oct 7

    My web site and blog are more than dusty, they are neglected remnants of a career. A career made of supporting existing applications that leaves little energy for doing things that resemble design in the digital world. So in order to reinvigorate that...

  • Design of an Administrative Interface for Library Collections - Part 1 Jan 21

    The Challenge

    Developing an online application where library staff can upload and apply metadata to digital objects that can be included in collections and be able to display these collections publicly or privately depending on the type of collection...

  • Things Learnt Running Disqus Locally and Better Errors Aug 25

    I decided to start swapping out the CSS styles and layout for this site with CSS Grid. At the time of this writing, the site uses Skeleton for styles and layout. Skeleton is pretty good, but I just want to experiment with CSS Grid and different modular...

  • Color Alone Cannot be an Indicator May 9

    Two coffee pots with differently colored rectangles on the handles and a color key on the wall.

    Communicating something important with color alone is a problem for users with deficient color vision. So when you indicate something important in an interface with just color, you are creating a poor user experience for about 8% of the male population...

  • Default Alt Attribute in Rails Image Tag Helper Mar 7

    If you do not provide content for the alt attribute for your images, by default the image tag helper will use the file name with an initial cap and no file extension. This at first seems rather…um…helpful…but it really isn’t useful alternative text...