It does exactly what it says on the tin – it’s 79 short-essays (essentially blog posts) on a wide variety of issues, truths, myths and experiences as seen through the eyes of Michael Bierut. This is one of the best design books I’ve read regardless of it’s short, quickfire attitude – or maybe perhaps because of. In fact, I might even have to be so bold as to say this is one of the best books I’ve ever read.

It’s full of small smiles and head-nodding agreement moments, and this book managed to say more about the world of design in its first title of the first essay (Warning: May Contain Non-Design Content) than most design books manage to say in 200 beautifully laid out pages.

There’s no excuse for not buying this one. Quick, dirty, and full of home truths, this is an essential book for anyone.

Ben Terrett loved it too.

99% of the time, I hated the old design. It was difficult for me to read, so no doubt it was difficult for you to read too. So I decided to freshen it up a bit with a modified version of the very first theme I created when I transferred back over to Wordpress.

As you can see, it’s dead plain and simple, and easy to read. I wanted to let the text speak for itself, but let the design still be easy to navigate. I’ve still got some stuff to fix yet, but I was so sick of the old design that I wanted to put this one live straight away even if it had a few bugs.

If anyone finds any problems with it, I’d appreciate it if you could drop it in the comments.

Foolishly, I’ve yet to see the damage Internet Explorer does to it.

It’s nice sitting down again and reflecting for 10 minutes when I get the chance, and it’s all served to highlight exactly how ridiculously busy I usually am. Once again, it’s 10pm and I’ve only just wrapped up doing work. I literally do sit at a PC nearly all day during the week, from 9 in the morning until 10 at night, with a few hours in between for eating, gyming, and whatever else I do.

This week I’m extra busy, as I scuttle furiously to get a damn website finished before the end of the week. I’ve got 2 super-secret projects I want to get live and on the Internet, and about 10 other pipe dream websites that I’ll probably never get around to doing.

However, at least my portfolio is finally filling up with some work I’m proud of. It just means I’m getting less and less time to do some fun stuff.

1. Absolutely, under no circumstances, use Microsoft Silverlight for anything on your website. Nobody uses it, and nobody has it installed. Just use Flash.
2. Don’t be afraid of using white text on a black background, but make sure you make the extra effort to make it readable. Make the text slightly off-white instead of a pure white, and make the background slightly off-black. Increase the leading past what you’d use normally. And above all else, try and read it yourself. If you can’t read it, nobody else will.
3. Test your website in as many browsers as you can, but make sure you test it in the main browsers; IE6, IE7, Firefox, Opera and Safari. If you’re a Mac user, don’t use that as an excuse for not testing it on a PC. Websites can look radically different between the two – especially text sizes.
4. SEO is good to make your website more visible in the search engines, but don’t go so far as to optimise your website for the search engines more than your users. Don’t load your title tags with keywords – make them useful to your users.
5. Don’t focus all your attention on your homepage, because most people will never see it. Users usually find your website through the search engines, so make sure all your interior pages are just as easy to use as your homepage.
6. Also, make your homepage easy to use. If people are lost on your website, they’ll do one of two things: They’ll click the home button if they can find it, or they’ll leave. Make sure that if they decide to visit your homepage they don’t feel lost anymore.
7. Keep content short and to the point.
8. If your page looks like it has lots of content on it, people won’t read it. Make your content look easy to read.
9. Look at bbc.co.uk. This is an example of a good website.
10. Make your content useful to your users. If it isn’t useful, don’t have it on your website.

It’s understandable. Graphic design is a somewhat secluded profession, and often quite mysterious. The main problem with the term “graphic design” is that so many things fall under such a broad term making it difficult to pin point exactly what it is I do when I’m talking to people with no knowledge. I often go for the layman’s approach to describing it: “I design business cards, letterheads, leaflets, brochures, stuff like that”. But that doesn’t even come close to what I do really.

Let me split it down into two sections to make it a bit easier. The web bit – the work I do on the Internet such as designing and building websites, and the print bit – everything else I do that isn’t online.

The Web Stuff
This bit is often a lot easier to describe to people than the other side of what I do – I design websites. Design in this sense tends to involve a lot of things; creating the overall visual look of the website, crafting the experience that the user will go through, and figuring out how anyone who visits the website will interact with it, and in what way. A lot of these steps fall into place all at once when I’m putting ideas down for a website.

Once that’s completed and the client likes what I’ve done, the next stage is to get that image onto the Internet as a fully-functioning website. Unsurprisingly this process takes longer than designing it, and to explain exactly what I do here would both bore you and make you want to kill yourself, so I’ll avoid going into any more depth than that.

The Print Stuff
As for the print work that I do… well, I do all sorts. Almost anything you can think of that is printed I design: brochures, adverts, business cards, posters, events lists, menus, the list goes on and on. That’s primarily why it’s so difficult to pigeonhole this side of my work into an easy way to understand it – because there’s just such a wide variety of it.

So, I hope that helps you understand how difficult it is to describe exactly what I do in less than 4 hours.

Anyhow, you may have also noticed I’ve returned to the pink and high contrast. People are always telling me how they preferred the pinkness of the old design, so I decided I would return to that. After all, that is the design from which all my serious daily blogging started, so I feel it a tad mean not to recognise that. And also, I like pink.

Homepage article layout has been influence by Darfuria’s idea, and I take no credit for that. As soon as I saw the idea when he first redesigned his blog I thought of it as a good way to get people to interact with your blog, and also a good way of showing more posts on the homepage. I still to this day enjoy using the same design, so I hope you’ll come to love the new way of showing articles too.

That’ll do. Bed time. Can’t be arsed to check for spelling mistakes.

Shoot me.

Please LOVE, get it sorted.

This is useful. And a very good idea.