http://www.henrytapia.com Personal site of Henry Tapia - web and digital media designer Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:28:43 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I just published a blog post over at The Snow Patrol, in turn relating to a discussion at Econsultancy about the growing trend in e-commerce platforms to be reliant on Javascript. It would seem that it's often a tall order to build sites in a way that will work without Javascript ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2010/03/01/javascript-e-commerce-and-progressive-enhancement/ Russell Davies spoke about this project of his at last year's very inspiring dConstruct conference, dubbed Newspaper Club. His team have come up with a way to use commercial newspaper production facilities to produce bespoke newspapers for whoever wants to give it a go. As a designer and admirer of ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2010/01/20/newspaper-club-up-and-running/ Last week, a group of us went along to the Tate Modern to see one of their current exhibitions - Pop Life: Art in a Material World. "Good business is the best art." — Andy Warhol Pop Life explores a newer generation of artists that have made use of the media to capitalise ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2009/11/30/pop-life/ E-commerce mavens (and benevolent employers) Snow Valley were lovely enough to send a couple of us along to dConstruct 09 down in Brighton last week. This was a good thing, as dConstruct was a quality conference with lots of food for thought. Hopefully slides or videos of the talks will ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2009/09/13/dconstruct-2009-was-cool/ Now that the dust has settled on the launch of TurnTubelist a bit, not to mention Mr Speaker’s awesome continual improvements, I thought I’d share some thoughts about a few possible next steps, at least as far as user experience goes. If you haven’t had a play, go there now. None ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2009/03/15/turntubelist-some-next-steps/ Not much happening here lately. Busy times (as usual) but also spending more time microblogging on Twitter. Took a while to figure out its usefulness, but after giving it a good go for a few months now I'm getting the gist of what it's all about. Seeing as people always ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2009/01/24/why-twitter/ UPDATE: Webjam 8 vids are up. Check out the Turntubelist presentation at the end of this post. UPDATE 2: TurnTubelist is now LIVE. Go now and play with it and let us know what you think. We are still tweaking it but we decided to get it up and out there. ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/09/27/turntubelist-wins-first-prize-at-webjam-8/ Been very busy around here, though you wouldn't figure it from the activity on this site. Some recent happenings with me... Finally got a new UK Work permit visa! An incredible amount of preparation and bureaucratic delays, after which I had to travel to Australia. In the end it took a ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/09/23/recent-stuff-2/ Last week I attended the very excellent @media 2008 web design and development conference at the Southbank Centre here in London. There were some great presentations by Indi Young, Andy Clarke and others but I’d have to say Jeffrey Veen’s presentation was probably the most interesting for me, entitled Designing ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/06/05/visualising-information/ Not long ago, I metnioned Adobe's launch of Photoshop Express, a beginner-friendly web version of their famous photo editor. It would seem that they weren't satisfied with that so they've gone and launched Acrobat.com, a suite of collaborative tools which "you can use to create documents together and share ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/06/02/acrobatcom-adobes-new-online-collaboration-tools-nice/ Last year I wrote about SitePoint's design contest site, a place where businesses can crowdsource spec work from designers. SitePoint has since spun this off into its own site, 99 Designs, which is the same as what SitePoint Contests was but wrapped up in an uninspiring design. I recommend taking ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/05/14/sitepoint-defends-design-contests/ Here's some jQuery love for you front-end types. I have certainly been enjoying using jQuery a lot lately. So damn efficient and easy to use. An active community means there are lots of handy plug-in libraries out there to take care of your tabs, carousels and fadey bits... (If you're ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/04/22/load-only-the-jquery-plugins-you-need-when-you-need-them/ We were recently discussing some quotes from Apple man Steve Jobs around the office, where he talked about his philosophy when it comes to design: It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. BusinessWeek, May ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/04/16/designing-for-yourself/ Well, looks like Adobe has pulled another one out of the bag with Photoshop Express, a web-based Flash application that lets you colour adjust, retouch and add effects to your photographs without installing anything. The interface is really easy to use and it looks as though this is aimed at your ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/03/29/photoshop-express/ Update: Firefox 2.0.0.13 is now out and it would appear the bug has been fixed. Any web developers that spend any time using CSS would be familiar with the Firebug add-on for Firefox. (If you don't have it, get it. It is the best web development and diagnostics tool out there.) Having ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/03/25/firebug-problem-in-firefox-20012-workaround/ A List Apart's latest edition (#254) is all about design, and approaches the subject from two very different angles. Naz Hamid has written about perfecting your designs by paying attention to all the little details. I wasn't hugely impressed by this article. I echo some of the comments made in that ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/03/16/creativity/ So SXSW 2008 is on at the moment. It's hard to believe it's been a year already since I attended last years Interactive festival. How time flies and all that. So the web awards winners have been announced. The very talented mob at Preloaded took out the game category as well ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/03/15/web-award-winners-sxsw-2008/ I've always been a fan of clean design, and keeping things simple and to the point. I'm getting a lot of opportunities to put that into practice at Snow Valley over here in London. With this in mind I'm once again contemplating a redesign. Typical web designer behaviour no doubt, ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/03/11/redesign-thinkings/