A user experience design and web development blog from web studio, Front

Manning Up: Your Project Crew

2011-05-25T11:58:00Z

Web projects are hard work and never plain sailing. They all hit choppy waters and storm fronts at some point. So when the winds whip up, who do you need on deck to help you successfully reach your destination?

Planning a Website that Works for You

2011-05-10T11:18:00Z

If you’re going to renovate, create a space that solves problems and performs, not one that’s pretty but pointless

Introducing the Front Project Planner

2011-05-03T08:54:00Z

A successful project starts with a well thought out project brief. This is why we developed the Front Project Planner – to share our experience and help you set strong foundations to achieve your goals.

The Goldilocks Approach to Responsive Design

2011-04-29T08:37:00Z

With over 4 billion mobile devices in use around the world, mobile browsing is rising fast. We can no longer assume that our sites will be viewed on a desktop monitor with an average resolution. Perhaps we never could.

UPDATES:We’ve published a demo. You should try itWe’ve released boilerplate CSS and HTML files for download, tooThe answer, proposed by Ethan Marcotte, is Responsive Web Design. Instead of building separate sites for each device, we build one site that adapts to each device. However, the current approach to responsive design is still based on a few popular devices and, as a result, is likely to become obsolete as fast as they do. What if we could create a truly universal design that was device independent – one that, no matter what device you viewed it on, looked like it was designed just for that device? At New Adventures, Mark Boulton talked about designing from the content out, rather than the canvas in, and we think this makes good sense. Perhaps the only way to create a design that will work on any device is to forget about the device altogether.

New Adventures in Web Design - The Highlights

2011-01-25T17:36:00Z

What a fantastic day at the New Adventures conference last week: fun crowd, great diggs and first-class speakers who made our brains teem with ideas. The Front team plus 600+ web designers joined Simon Collison in the Albert Hall for his first industry conference. One of the world’s great web designers, Simon curated a one-day schedule that would challenge even the most seasoned organiser: 10 talks and two live Q&A panel debates in eight hours.

Brilliant Ideas for Business

2010-12-01T07:43:00Z

We are at a time when competing to be a cost leader is a losing game. Winning through number of features or technical brevity is also an increasingly risky route to take. The world is getting smaller and the concept of geography is become irrelevant in many markets. So amongst all this doom and gloom, where will our competitive advantage come from in the future?

We’re sponsoring New Adventures in Web Design!

2010-11-30T18:01:00Z

We’re really pleased to announce that we’ll be sponsoring the New Adventures in Web Design conference in Nottingham on the 20th January 2011.

Hosted by Simon Collison, New Adventures promises to be “carefully curated; chock-full of integrity, opinion, and fresh content, with an emphasis on shaking things up and challenging convention”.

Build – that difficult second album

2010-11-30T09:59:00Z

This month, for the second year running, Belfast was host to a web design conference with world class speakers that included Liz Danzico, Dan Cederholm and Frank Chimero. With a line up like this, organiser Andy McMillan and Build were once again destined for glory and it produced even better results than I expected.

Award Winning Website Design

2010-11-01T15:49:00Z

The Front studio is currently celebrating wins for our clients the Abbey Theatre and Island Lolly, while enjoying industry recognition for our design capabilities at the IDI Design Awards, Irish Web Awards and the .Net Awards. For a studio that doesn’t normally enter awards, we appear to be doing rather well.

Running the Dublin Marathon for MS. Can you help?

2010-10-20T08:20:00Z

On October 25th, just before 9am, I will be lining up on Fitzwilliam Street in Dublin with approximately 10,000 other people getting ready to start the Dublin Marathon. We will all be there for different reasons. Some will be there to push their personal limits, some as part of a series of marathons. Personally, I’m trying to raise money for the MS Society by pushing myself to run the 26 miles 385 yards. Please make a donation if you can help.

Some facts about Multiple Sclerosis: MS is almost twice as common in women than men Most people are diagnosed between 20 & 40 years old. There are estimated to be 100,000 people in the UK with MS. The symptoms are very wide and vary considerably from person to person It takes £113 per day to pay for an MS Nurse in a local area - this provides support for 350 people in the local area.