Quote anecdotally misattributed to Charles H. Duell, Commisioner, US Patent Office, 1899

Apparantly a misquote, sometimes the web can feel like this at times. You work on a idea you have just thought of, only to find it already exists.

Whilst working on something for http://10k.aneventapart.com/ – an event where you can submit a little web app which is no larger than 10k, I did a bit of googling to find the exact same thing has already been built.

Colour Palette Creator

After seeing Andy Clarke’s post ages ago about creating colour palettes, I thought it would be a great little tool to have – and the 10k event was the perfect opportunity to make it. But I was beaten to it: http://slayeroffice.com/tools/color_palette/

And again…

A while ago I had the idea of a neverending book idea, where everyone can add a sentence to continue the book. Yep, already been done.

The same goes for website designs. I saw a blog design with the identical look to one of the rejected mockups for this blog. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t take mine further than the PSD stage; good job too.

Why am complaining?

Most of my ‘ideas’ are just that – they never get past a quick doodle in the Moleskine. I should be grateful these people are building my ideas!

Back to the drawing board

So once again, I am thinking of things to make for the event. Lets build it quick before anyone else does!

The many redesigns are usually due to me getting bored with the site. My skills and design knowledge have improved and a personal brand redesign along the way have changed the look also.

Part of the problem comes with a lack of purpose for the site. Although a designer I don’t have much of a portfolio on the website – mainly because I am currently in full-time employment and do not show any work I do during office hours. The site also isn’t a promotional tool either so it only exists to be a place to blog and host experiments.

So I again rethink the purpose of the site, and after recent analysis reports being constructed by @RobHawkes I have been rethinking what I want to do with the site:

• Publish experiments
• Indepth research
• Front-end focused
• Collate social profile (last.fm, twitter, dribbble, delicious)
• Frequent blogging

This will no doubt come with a new website design, and i’m also thinking about moving from WordPress to a custom CMS. Along with all the hacking i’ve heard about recently to WordPress blogs I have always had a keen interest in optimisation and speed.

Watch this space.

It is inevitable then that these new and shiny capabilities will catch a web designer’s eye (especially after years of browser constraints) but are we turning our eagerness to use the latest styling techniques into a world of monotonous and similar designs?

A Screenshot Showing Some Modern Design Trends

It’s worth saying that there are some great sites being produced at the minute. Something I hope to write about in a future post.

I’m a Magpie Designer Too!

This post isn’t without a sense of irony, i’m all too well aware of as this site features many of the effects i’m talking about. I’m clearly a magpie designer too!

In a years time things will probably calm down when “the next thing” arrives, whatever it is.

After a long period of inactivity, due to a new job, and other things the site has sat a little dorment. I thought it was time for a change, and after many, many revisions I decided to finally design something. So, after a few hours of work this weekend – here it is.

I’m hoping to tidy a few things up over the next week, and I will follow that up with a more indepth blog on the designs that didn’t make it.

If you do notice something weird, feel free to post a comment. It hasn’t been browser tested, but bear in mind that things may look a little funky for the next few days.

Layout and Composition

Typograph – Scale & Rhythm
On Font Pairing In Logo Design
Rules for Good Typography
On The Track of Good Type

Designs, Wallpapers and Posters

21 Big, Bold Typography Website Design
40+ Awesome Typography Wallpapers
Type and Cities – Designers’ typographic posters of New York
TypographicPosters.com

Inspiration

A Treasury of Wood Type Online
Typography & Lettering Flickr Pool
Typeface: The Film
The Beauty of Ampersands
Incredible Typography by Eika Dopludo
21 Fresh Inspiring Typography Designs

Helvetica

40 Excellent Logos Created With Helvetica
The Simplicity of Helvetica

If you have links you would like to share, please leave a comment.

The debate seems to polarise the web community, with many web designers using differing methods. Some tag the logo as an H1 element whilst others using the H1 for the page title.

Twitter Opinions

During the weekend, I spent a few hours with serial Twitter developer Ollie Parsley and we created www.h1debate.com. The website was massively more popular than either of us imagined which in the space of a week, had been featured on over 20 websites, visited over 3,000 times and has had over 300 unique votes on the subject.

As of 6th Feb 2009, the ratio is split 70/30, with 70% of people preferring to use the H1 tag for the main heading, and 30% opting to wrap the company name or logo around an H1.

Quite a few high profile web designers added their opinion to the H1 Debate. You can read their comments as well as interesting articles on heading tags by following @h1debate.

Personal Opinion

I do agree, there are certain pages that don’t have a specific main heading. For example the Digg.com website uses an H1 as the title on its homepage, yet uses an H1 as the main heading of an inside page, but every inner page has different content, and I think the H1 should describe it.

After reading the tweets, I have grown to like the idea of using an H1 on the homepage for the company name or logo, and to use H1 on ‘inside’ pages for the main page title.

From a search engine point of view, does an H1s’ weighting decrease if each page of the website is called the same name?

Accessibility

After looking into the subject of headings and accessibility, I came across a YouTube video by Aaron Cannon, and Accessibility Consultant who says:

All good screen readers offer a feature to jump from heading to heading. Assuming that headings are used properly on a website they can give an overview of what the author wanted to stand out. What were the important sections of the website.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=AmUPhEVWu_E

With a screen reader, pressing the H key takes you to the first heading, and allows you to jump from headline to headline. This allows you to jump to the content and start reading. Using the same H1 would mean that a screen reader would read out the company name/logo every single time on each page. Is that useful? Is it the best use of an H1? Once maybe, but on every page, I can imagine it gets repetitive for the user.

The Early Days of HTML

Another area of my research took me to an early (1992) document, which states:

It is suggested that the first heading be one suitable for a reader who is already browsing in related information, in contrast to the title tag which should identify the node in a wider context.

http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/Tags.html

The Answer is?

I don’t think there will ever be a definitive answer, and I agree with the comments that sites should be judged on a case-by-case basis. I think this quote sums it up:

The H1 element defines a level-one heading. A document generally should have exactly one H1 element to mark the most important heading.

What the ‘most important heading’ is depends entirely on the website.

Please do keep tagging your tweets with #h1logo and #h1title because even if your vote has been counted, your views will still appear on the website. Thanks to the thousands of you who have already visited The H1 Debate, and for leaving us with all your comments on this subject.

Then a competition was launched by Channel 4 called ‘Webit’ aimed at 13-19 year olds. I heard about the competition from my School, and I thought about redesigning paulsmini to enter the competition, but in the end, I decided to just submit the site as it was, and was shocked to be a runner up for the whole competition.

This spurred me on to further a career in web design, and before I finished my A-Levels I asked around for work experience in the industry, which was eventually unsuccessful after contacting a number of them.

My first job was as an IT Administrator at a local manufacturing company, where I managed to redesign their existing site. I was also enrolled in a 3 year Foundation Degree course in Computing and Internet Technology. The course consisted of networking, programming, databases and internet technologies. The Internet for me was my primary focus at the time, although I have continued to learn both databases and programming since; but my primary love is designing.

The more I designed the more I enjoyed it. I liked the fact that every project was different and that no two designs were ever the same. It also made me further myself in design and the design fundamentals, learning about grid based design, the rule of thirds and typography.

I knew eventually that I would have to look for a job doing web design full time if I wanted to continue this, so after seeing an advert in the local paper, I got my CV up to date, made sure that the works site and paulsmini were all live and sent an application. About a week later I got a phone call just after finishing work on the Friday offering an interview, and 24 hours later I was offered the job.

I stayed at the web design company for 18 months, and it gave me a solid foundation into the business of designing websites, having the opportunity to work on 20+ during that time. In the time, I had learnt about ASP and MS SQL Server databases. It gave me a great basis to look for my next job.

Around May 2008 I moved again to my current job, and in the last 9 months I have been working increasingly more in PHP and MySQL, whilst also utilising JavaScript more, with the jQuery library.

My passion for websites continues, and designing them is still what I most enjoy, but I do see the benefits of working on both design and development at the same time, so would never want to just to one of the two.