Field Notes

Agile and design. Like oil and water, the two don’t play well together. Yet as we create more complex digital products and services, they need to work to a common goal. How might we keep the delivery a…

A triple whammy of backed-up weeknotes. Sundays are generally far too busy to be able to decompress, wind down and write a comprehensive recap of the past 7 days. I'm not sure if this is a good or a…

So tardy with this week. Better late than never I suppose. I also think I have a relatively good reason, getting home late on Sunday night meant there was no time to write these. Why so late you ask?…

Claps. It’s what I’ve been calling a new XC route on the South Downs, a short skip from my front door. It stands for climbing + laps, and it’s a 7.11km XC loop that includes a long b*stard of a climb…

What a week. Often accompanied by Rich, each day this week was spent travelling to a new, prospective or current client across London or Sussex. A good problem to have... Clearleft seems to be pretty…

OK, I’m doing it. I’m jumping on the weeknotes train. Next stop: frequency anxiety! 🚂 Folks may notice that I’ve given my corner of a web a little upgrade. This wasn’t only to create a better representa…

Digital transformation. It sounds so grandiose, doesn’t it? Like some sort of beautiful metamorphosis: an ugly caterpillar of old tech🐛 magically becoming a beautiful butterfly🦋, resplendent in its new dig…

I’ve just finished a long stint working within a large, risk-averse organisation. Being product-side for a change has been an incredibly eye-opening experience. It’s the first time in more than a dec…

The retrospective is — in my opinion — one of the most important activities in any project. Routine post-sprint retros are a great indicator of project health, but end-of-project wash-ups are where the real ge…

Our ability to learn when things go wrong is what helps us grow. Not just as individuals but as an industry. By better understanding when our ego clouds our better judgement, when we’re pointing f…

Our industry’s penchant for showing semi-fictional, utopian case studies has always rankled me. No project goes smoothly. There’s always something that goes wrong, and it’s often those moments where we gr…

My first salary job out of university was working as an Accounts Receivable manager. I somehow managed to get companies across Canada to pay their overdue invoices for my employer: a clothing company…

Sign-off. As Andy rightly points out in his recent post, it’s a thing that shouldn’t be part of the modern digital designer’s lexicon. I totally agree, and in some cases this is the reality. But sadly…

As the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. The same has to be said for leaving an agency that felt more like family than a job over the last 6 years. Truth be told I’ve meant to write t…

Back in 2013 I visited NYC to attend the wonderful Brooklyn Beta conference. It was Autumn. There was a slight nip in the air, the leaves were turning, and the weather was amazing. During one of our…

I’m all for design systems. I’ve designed and created many, and they’re a great way of unifying patterns, usage and language. They reduce time, save on costs and promote modular, systems-based think…

Are designers evolving from just UX designers or just visual designers into multi-disciplinary generalists? There seems to be higher-quality design all-rounders coming back into vogue.…

As a visual designer working on agile projects, I’ve said before how it’s easy to lose sight of the larger visual language in agile sprints. When you’re tackling user stories with your head down, it’s …

A few years ago when Mark wrote his article on performance budgets, we were working together on a redesign for a luxury travel holiday website. The use of large images and typography to create a…

A decade or more ago, digital marketing was more of a blunt instrument. It was like the first stone axe - crude, but it got the job done. I started my career in digital marketing. I’ve witnessed its g…

A look into my use of Strava and how it's positively affected my behaviour over time. My name is Jon, and I'm a Strava user. I never thought I could be as fundamentally affected by an app as I have…

When designing a site, app or digital product, all of the elements on screen need to work together. They need to sing together, harmonise with one another and form something greater than their…

Climbing 13,000 feet and riding 100 miles on a mountain bike... in a day. The South Downs Way is a long distance footpath and bridleway running along the South Downs in southern England. It is one of…

Always nice getting a shout-out on a podcast, this time regarding the Code for America work and element collages.

This article was originally posted on the Clearleft blog. Most Hack Farm projects start as someone's itch that needs scratching. Last year's TinyPlanner was Boxman's need for a backwards to-do list.…