Improbable Botany is a brand-new science fiction anthology about alien plant conquests, fantastical ecosystems, benevolent dictatorships and techno-utopias.

This is the book plants don’t want you to read…

The illustrations look beautiful too.

Sunday, July 23rd, 2017

100 Demon Dialogues – Lucy Bellwood

This is easily the most relatable 100 Days project I’ve seen:

I began posting a daily dialogue with the little voice in my head who tells me I’m no good.

Now you can back already-funded the Kickstarter project to get the book …and a plush demon.

Monday, May 1st, 2017

Electronic Items

I love the way Guillaume Kurkdjian uses animation here to demonstrate how these gadgets from the ’90s would work.

Thursday, November 24th, 2016

History of Icons – a visual brief on icon history by FUTURAMO

An illustrated history of digital iconography.

Wednesday, May 25th, 2016

Jessman5 on Twitter: “I made a poster from @adactio’s talk about Resilience. :) This took me way too long…”

I love this illustration that Jess made of my Resilience talk at the Render conference.

Tuesday, August 25th, 2015

Building the dConstruct 2015 site

I remember when I first saw Paddy’s illustration for this year’s dConstruct site, I thought “Well, that’s a design direction, but there’s no way that Graham will be able to implement all of it.” There was a tight deadline for getting the site out, and let’s face it, there was so much going on in the design that we’d just have to prioritise.

I underestimated Graham’s sheer bloody-mindedness.

At the next front-end pow-wow at Clearleft, Graham showed the dConstruct site in all its glory …in Lynx.

I love that. Even with the focus on the gorgeous illustration and futuristic atmosphere of the design, Graham took the time to think about the absolute basics: marking up the content in a logical structured way. Everything after that—the imagery, the fonts, the skewed style—all of it was built on a solid foundation.

It would’ve been easy to go crazy with the fonts and images, but Graham made sure to optimise everything to within an inch of its life. The biggest bottleneck comes from a third party provider—the map tiles and associated JavaScript …so that’s loaded in after the initial content is loaded. It turns out that the site build was a matter of prioritisation after all.

There’s plenty of CSS trickery going on: transforms, transitions, and opacity. But for the icing on the cake, Graham reached for canvas and programmed space elevator traffic with randomly seeded velocity and size.

Oh, and of course it’s all responsive.

So, putting that all together…

The dConstruct 2015 site is gorgeous, semantic, responsive, and performant. Conventional wisdom dictates that you have to choose, but this little site—built on a really tight schedule—shows otherwise.

Tuesday, June 30th, 2015

Why availability matters

A superb illustration of why playing the numbers game and dismissing even a small percentage of your potential audience could be disastrous.

It’s not 1% of people who always can’t see your site and 99% of people who always can. It’s 1% of visits. Almost all the people who don’t get your site correctly actually should have been able to. They don’t have JavaScript turned off. They’re not browsing on a WAP phone over a 2g connection from a shanty town. They’re you, in a cellar bar or a hotel room or waiting for the phone network to wake back up.

Friday, June 26th, 2015

2 Kinds of People

Dividing the world in two.

Saturday, October 4th, 2014

Tabletop Whale

Beautiful visualisations of science and nature.

Made with love by a designer with a molecular biology degree.

Tuesday, August 26th, 2014

A Single Div

Wonderfully creative use of CSS gradients, borders, box-shadows, and generated content.

Saturday, February 1st, 2014

Kyle Bean - Whistleblower

If you picked up the Guardian this weekend, you’ll have seen some brilliant work by Kyle on the cover (and inside) the magazine section.

Saturday, December 28th, 2013

Windows of New York | A weekly illustrated atlas

Lovely little graphics inspired by New York architecture.

Tuesday, June 4th, 2013

2001: A Space Odyssey

A really nice piece on Robert McCall, who was artist-in-residence at NASA and worked as conceptual artist on Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Tuesday, March 26th, 2013

Kyle Bean - Portfolio

Kyle’s new site is looking lovely and responsive (thanks to Josh). But mostly it just gets out of the way so you can take in his truly amazing work.

Tuesday, June 26th, 2012

Jess & Russ

This is so lovely! The story of Jessica and Russ’s romance, illustrated by fifteen of their friends.

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