Mark McGall

I Love Letters

27/07/09

I thought I'd have a wee chat about letters. As the title suggest I love letters. From fonts to abstract graffiti wild styles, letters fascinate me. I suppose graffiti tought me the importance and beauty of letters which allowed an easy transition into the designers view of letters. More recently my perspective between the two has been blurred. I see graffiti styles in fonts and font styles in graffiti and sometimes I get ridiculously mixed up and can't differentiate between the two. So...this has lead me into a new hobby. creating my own fonts. I have the ideas and many doodles of font styles from my noggin that I hope will be both useful and interesting to people. None of these are anywhere near ready or even close to be talked about in any great detail. Hopefully over the coming months I will have something to post, progress wise, but for the moment I just thought I'd let you know to look out for it.

I know there wasn't a great deal of use writing this and making you read it but sure I might as well.

Watch This Space!

Just purchased and currently reading Web Standards Solutions.

22/07/09

So, I've just bought the special, super, super special edition of Web Standards Solutions. Holy crap this book is brilliant. Its author, Dan Cederholm, really is some sort of genious. I always knew web standards were important however, before reading this book I didn't understand why they are applied the way they are and how much easier standard, minimal markup can make life for the XHTML/CSS designer. The book shows you all possible angles for certain tasks your average 'coder' will face and looks at the good and bad points of each, helping the reader to choose and understand why this is the best solution for each individual problem. Does that make sense? Probably not but trust me it's great

Now I'm not that far in, but already I understand why we do things in a certain way and why this gives the best results. For example, List Items. I know how to write a list correctly, I vaguely knew what advantages this brought to me, but I didnt understand why this was the correct, most efficient and semantic (book word) way of writing a list. I highly recommend this book and I look forward to finishing it and the rest of Mr Cederholms publications. Awesome stuff.

Recently Featured On Smashing Magazine.

22/07/09

I was recently featured on Smashing Magazine with a few other folk from university, the article I was included in was 'Unique About Pages'. You can View the article here.

Thanks to Mark Nutter and the folks at Smashing Magazine including me, and congratulations to Jonny Campbell and Suzy Johnston for getting featured aswell!