Conánn Fitzpatrick Alvarez-Casado

Category: Tips

  • Sketchbook/Notebook methodology

    Sketchbook/Notebook methodology

    Sketchbooks and notebooks are one and the same when you are an artist. Sketches are notes and notes illustrations of moments of inspiration and enquiry.  The most important part of any system is to stay out of the way of creativity and spark that lights our fire. Pages of drawings can be free conventions unless […]

  • Need to write a creative brief?

    Bellow are guidelines for anyone wishing to write the perfect creative brief. When engaging in a new project we want to get the ball rolling quickly, layout expectations early and agree time-scales and budgets. 

    Removing ifs, buts and maybes from the process greatly increases the chances of the designer surpassing the client’s expectations and the development of a lasting relationship. 

     

  • Tests for common HTML elements

    This is something I have played with on and off when building websites for clients. The idea is to provide a single unpublished post that can be used as style reference when writing their own posts. For the most part it is ignored and merely serves as a way for me to make sure I have covered all the bases within the CSS.

    I am pretty sure much of this example was pinched from someone else but I have no idea where or when, so apologies and thanks. Please feel free to steel from here and let me know if there are elements which would can be added.

    Paragraphs & boxes

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

    Full Width Images 670px

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor sub text ut labore et sup text magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

  • Fantastic Design Tools

    http://www.uistencils.com These tools are great for the democratisation of design and for speeding up the communication of good ideas before they are lost to muddling over iconography and proportion. First on my list will be the iPad kit. Not that I have an iPad but I like the idea of using an iPadPad for every day […]

  • Corrupt Fonts in Microsoft Word on OS X

    For awhile now I have been suffering from a bad case of microsoftness. Everytime I launch an Office app I have been getting endless corrupt font errors, which prevent the app from opening correctly. Not surprisingly no other programs are effected it’s just an office problem. I have tried switching to NeoOffice and the other contenders but Office is by far the best tool for the job.

    Solution

    Took a few searches and problems but I found the solution here in an article by Beth Rosengard. After reading the article I downloaded Linotype which fixed the problem right away no problems no fus and no major trauma.

  • Good advice from Anil Dash

    I talk to a lot of consultants, freelancers, and small businesses who do web work, and I used to be a freelancer myself, so sometimes I get asked for advice on how to price one’s goods and services. I think I came up with my best suggestion today, and it involves only two simple steps:

    1. Slap the client in face.
    2. Tell the client your hourly rate.
    If the person looked more shocked, horrified, offended, hurt, saddened, or wounded by the slap in the face, then you are still pricing yourself too low. Your mileage my vary, this is not to be construed as legal advice, eye-poking may be substituted for slapping in some states.

  • Search Engine Optimization for Dummies

    There is a really good SEO piece over at The Blog Herald which I found via one of my regular reads . Since switching from a flash format to a blog format for this website I have been getting more and more interested in this topic as I have seen a vast increase in the amount of Google juice I get. Rather then write my version of what others have already said I thought I would try and pool together different sources that have been of great help to me along the way.

    A visit to the is very revealing when looked at in this context it is not a measure of google rank but it is a quick way to look at what top sites are doing. It becomes quickly apparent is that there is no one-way to skin this cat and the only thing that these sites have in common is they have great content. I am too new at this blogging thing to even pretend that I know anything about great content so I can’t help there, but there are some things we have control over which can greatly improve our websites performance.

    Understanding What Search Engines See

    Google doesn’t see nice styling and does not take a look images when deciding what your site is about, it sees your documents content in the context of its structure. So what gives a site its structure and how does it help your blog? Structure comes from HTML and each of the elements gives its content meaning. Use heading tags for headings, paragraph tags for paragraphs, link tags for links etc, Google understands this and uses this structure to make decisions about your content. Problems only arise when you start to do things wrong. If you use a strong tag for a heading Google presumes your know what you are doing and reads it as bold text rather then an important part of the page structure. So what are some of the important elements to keep control of?