Field Notes

This article was originally posted on the Clearleft blog Arguably the key deliverable we hand over to our clients is our pattern portfolio, comprised of two main components: The component library is…

Better late than never, right? In retrospect, my 2012 was pretty huge, both professionally and personally. On new additions In the early summer we welcomed another Aizlewood into the world - Indiana…

... absolutely nothin'! (Say it again, y'all) A short while back, I pitched for a project that I ultimately lost. After putting together a comprehensive proposal and fielding numerous questions…

Creating the content for your website can be a difficult task. You have to gather information, consult experts, write thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of words, source images and get people to…

In early November, Quality English were kind enough to Eurostar me down to Paris to present to their member schools on digital marketing. The presentation, entitled ' The demise of the desktop:…

It's finally happened. After almost a year of waiting, a team of web designers, web developers, an agency and many talented others have been working with a well-known newspaper to launch the…

Should websites be built around the content, or should content be created to fit the design? Here’s an argument for creating content first – or at least thinking about content first. What is a web…

I'm currently attending the Brighton SEO conference at the Corn Exchange. Huge turnout, and clearly this industry continues to thrive. But, I'll admit it. Over the years my view on SEO has become…

As I type this, I'm currently on a break from attending the Brighton Digital Marketing Festival here in sunny Brighton. On Monday I was fortunate enough to attend the surprisingly fantastic Update…

Things have been pretty busy lately, hence the lack of posts. However, one piece of news worth sharing: CarbonGraffiti was selected to design and build the website for the inaugural Brighton Digital…

It’s been a crazy start to 2011. In fact, the last few months have been an absolute whirlwind. Here are some noteworthy the projects we’ve been working on, with services ranging from consulting to cus…

On January 27th I gave an hour-long talk on 'The Future of Digital Marketing', speaking specifically to the ELT (English Language Training) industry. The conference was put on by EnglishUK and…

I love football (and Arsenal specifically, if you must know). The business side of it fascinates me ( check out my post regarding the MCFC site redesign ) and I’ve always been fond of using football o…

We're conditioned to be reactive in life. If it's too sunny outside, we wear a hat. If it's too cold, we wrap up. As freelancers or small businesses, much of our time is devoted to working in a…

On September 22, November 26, January 31 2011 I'm giving a 1-day workshop in Brighton for email marketing. This workshop will cover the basics as outlined below, with a second, related day to be…

CarbonGraffiti is proud to be among a growing group of service providers listed on the all-new MailChimp Experts Directory. Now over 4 weeks old, the Directory is filling up fast, and looks to be the…

Using A List Apart's article on Responsive Web Design (by Ethan Marcotte) as inspiration, this site now uses CSS media queries to determine a visitor's screen resolution and serve up an appropriate…

Well, it's been a long time coming, but CarbonGraffiti has finally been picked up, dusted off, reconfigured, rethought, rebranded, rewritten and repolished within an inch of its life. Not bad. Just 8…

It's been a busy 5 months since going full-time freelance, and there's a lot of news coming soon, including a new website, new client announcements and much more. In the meantime however, I thought…

When designing and coding email designs, more often than not you're forced into using your browser to render the HTML code you're working on, and have to wait until you're ready to test across…

Wordpress, for those four in the back row who don't know, is the highly popular open-source blogging platform thankfully made by this guy. Fast forward a couple years, and Wordpress is going from…

As I recently commented on Twitter, the Google Creative lab crew recently posted a shared slideshow showcasing 87 cool things that, from their perspective, was stuff 'worth knowing about'. In a…

'What do you think? Should I focus on SEO?' A friend and colleague asked me this question recently, interested in breaking out of their current web publishing role and exploring some new, exciting…

Argos. Clearly doing well as the UK's most popular 'catalogue showroom retailing' store in the UK. More than 700 stores, 130m customers and £4.3b in sales in 2008 isn't bad. They also take 26% of …

The English Premier League is big money. EPL clubs are as much businesses as they are generational sporting institutions, a point proven when cumulative wage bills total £1.2bn, revenues top £2bn, a…