Wouldn’t you know it—I’ve been spending a crazy amount of my free time working on freelance projects. One in particular has been a joy to work on and we just launched. I’m speaking about the work I did on the new Polar topic pages. It’s... More →

Luke Wroblewski recently published an article detailing some thinking regarding navigation patterns as they relate to users interacting with touch screens. As more diverse devices embrace touch as a primary input method, it may be time to revisit navigation standards on the Web. How can... More →

I’ve become fond of using CSS preprocessors more and more in my workflow and with SASS being a requirement for my work at Happy Cog, I’ve started to realize the power it can have. I feel comfortable constructing variables and mixins that do math and... More →

At Happy Cog, I’m doing a good amount of prototyping. The default way to start prototyping is to have multiple html files that repeat the same header/footer markup or use a static file blog generator like Jekyll to get those global site items in one... More →

Since the release of my FlexNav demo, a device agnostic approach to complex site navigation, I’ve been getting some email from designers/developers that wanted more out of the the script. Well, last night I went ahead and made FlexNav into a proper jQuery plugin. You... More →

Two months ago I gave my notice as a WordPress Designer/Developer at AgriLife after accepting a new Assistant Director of Publications position with the Division of Research at Texas A&M. I’ve been busy getting use to the new crew and working on exciting things for... More →

I’ve received some email regarding my Off Canvas demo with a few suggestions on how to make it better. While I think all of these ideas are fantastic, I’m not going to attempt to do so. The general layout for the pattern is there and... More →

I love that we can now design layouts that adjust to the viewport size. I’d pretty much thought I’d seen most of what could be accomplished with responsive design until Luke Wroblewski’s post on Multi-Device Layout Patterns. The section on the Off Canvas pattern kinda... More →

Using the idea from my Conditional Slideshow technique, I had the problem of pulling in appropriate content designed for specific pages in a CMS system while working on a project this week. I wanted a way to store some data tied to a particular page... More →

Spent the day yesterday hacking it up at HubAustin for API Hack Day. This would be my first time participating in an all day Hack-a-thon contest type of thing. I hitched a ride with Jeff and, as it turned out, learned a bunch from him... More →

At work we needed a new way to organize all our office locations across Texas and map them on a Google Map. Instead of coding up all the data in the document, I went a different route. (Get it? Different route… Ok, I’ll stop.) Enter... More →

More than a month ago I redesigned my front page so that I could easily change the look of it whenever I felt the urge. Today I’ve changed for the second time. I based the design on a pic I took of a full moon... More →

The problem with responsive slideshow plugins like FlexSlider and the like is the unnecessary large images a small screen mobile user is forced to download. There has been a lot of talk about the problem with responsive images lately. We have server side and client... More →

I’ve just finished up an interesting week at work and I’m gearing up for a three day weekend to get ready for a Super Bowl party on Sunday. Ok, so it’ll just be me and my father-in-law watching but I’ll be cooking homemade hot wings.... More →

I’ve just finished up a session on Designing Flexible Content at Word Up Austin where I outline my process for designing device agnostic sites. I was very impressed with the content at the meet up and had some great questions from the attendees. One section... More →

I’m reading The Elements of Typographic Style at the moment. It’s beautifully written and I’m learning how the rules author Robert Bringhurst lays out can be used on the web. But not all the rules translate to the web. Particularly when you accept the idea... More →

Back in December of 2010, Eivind Uggedal released the mediaqueri.es site to showcase websites implementing a technique called Responsive Web Design. I’m happy to report that my modest online journal you are reading here has been added to the showcase. It’s simple design is based... More →

Shi Chuan and Jeremy Keith have come up with a great solution to the orientation viewport scale problem that one experiences on iOS devices.I’ve been a bit flummoxed as to how to go about tackling the problem. It just doesn’t seem as smooth when you... More →

Had a chance to listen to all the talks and panels I missed at this year’s sxswi on Huffduffer. Jenn Lukas of Happy Cog on the No Excuse: Web Designers Who Can’t Code panel had something interesting to say: The thing that I have a... More →

I took part in the CNN Persona series at SouthBy this year. It was fun. We were all standing in line with our various items in our hands. I think at one point I had an entire conversation with the girl in front of me... More →

I’ve been using the iOS Simulator a ton as I initially design sites on my Mac. This helps with quickly seeing how the site will behave as the simulator switches orientation. Now, I’m not developing sites just for the ipad or iphone but this will... More →

For the past few months I’ve been working on redesigning the Texas AgriLife Extension county websites. This is essentially one WordPress theme for 256 individual Texas counties. Each county will have it’s own site and our web production team will be administering through a single... More →

There were tons of people at SouthBy and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to meet all my favorite industry leaders and other web geeks who I know only through Twitter. I knew I wanted to meet Jeremy Keith - who’s blog got me... More →

The last 5 years I’ve failed at getting a badge to the South By SouthWest Interactive conference. This year I had started working for a Texas State agency and my new boss, Travis, basically required that we attend. SXSWI started on March 11 in 2011... More →