From the category archives:

Miscellany

Will the real David Hughes please stand up?

Well, it’s hard to be definitive – there’s a lot of us about. And a lot of us work in creative fields of one sort or another. A quick search on Google will undoubtedly yield David Hughes the illustrator (brilliant) and David Hughes the dancer (also brilliant) and a host of other David Hughes’ of [...]

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David Hughes’ unwitting role in a recent email scam

Miscellany

David Hughes is a pretty common name. But when a friend received an email from David Hughes and Associates he immediately thought of my business. He assumed I had been the victim of identity theft. And in a sense I had – along with every other David Hughes in the world. Below is the content [...]

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Where, exactly, did the time go?

Miscellany

I attended a talk at the Kingston IET last night. I had a front row seat in a shed packed with aging engineers in the garden of the Lion Pub, Wicks Road, Kingston. Well, we’re all heading in the same direction at about the same rate so I guess we’re all aging something-or-others. I was [...]

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An end to entity envy

Miscellany

Using entity codes in your web copy is the right way to ensure that what you say comes out the way you intended. It’s also good practice if you want your code to validate. Blogs are particularly prone to mishaps with missing entity codes. &s; frequently get mangled and text cut and pasted from a [...]

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I don’t always know which colours go, but at least I now know where to go to get them.

Miscellany

It’s a sad confession for a designer, I know, but it’s born out of experience of hearing colour consultants speak about colour at a professional level. It showed me I really have no idea. We used to share office space with a colour forecasting company. The sort of business that predicts what we’re all going [...]

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House hunting made easier

Miscellany

A few years ago when I was moving house for the umpteenth time I remember thinking wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a map based around travel times so that you could shortlist possible areas to live that would combine the quickest door-to-door times with house prices that fell within your budget. It didn’t [...]

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A virulent infection in adland?

Miscellany

The latest VW and Audi ads seem to be evidence of a virus infecting the advertising world. The disease leads agencies and their clients to believe that they must make ads with lots of people busily building something related to their brand, in some suitably inventive way. Except they’re all looking distinctly uninventive now. The [...]

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Spam-free forms

Miscellany

It is a constant source of irritation that most forms submitted from our web sites are simply spam. And although it’s not the friendliest way of securing a form’s integrity I’ve finally succumbed to using an image based ‘captcha’ system as a way of separating the real visitors from the automated form-filling spambots. It did [...]

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Top quality mash

Miscellany

It’s hard enough keeping on top of the latest to-ings and fro-ings on even a handful of the social media networks. As new communities proliferate the temptation is to give up on it altogether. Add to that the growing number of other required viewing sites and there just aren’t enough hours in the day. Recently [...]

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