Citizensheep. "Michael Grimes lives in Birmingham (UK). This is his blog about anything that he fancies."

We often make the mistake of assuming that learning how to use a tool will somehow make us good at the job the tool was designed for. I believe our efforts are better spent on first learning the skills and then choosing the tools. Take Quark Xpress, an industrial-strength tool for graphic design professionals. Professionals. In [...]

I wish Chiltern Trains would either get rid of their ‘quiet’ coaches or do something to make them less appealing to noisy people. There are always those who ignore the rules, which only serves to make other people indignant and angry. And let’s face it, few people are going to ask a hooded youth to [...]

Tweelove is a lovely little service that lets you send nice anonymous greetings to people on Twitter.

This one’s really for Nicky over at Digbeth is Good, but as it could be useful for others it may as well go here. It explains how to use the Postalicious addon to add delicious bookmarks to your WordPress blog as single posts. It presumes a certain degree of experience with these tools. (Example of [...]

In a recent forum* post someone asked how to deliver online content to offline users. An understandable question maybe, but (I believe) a mistaken objective: communicating effectively should be more important than ensuring everyone has the same experience.

These graphics can be seen on trains in the UK. The one on the left was seen on First Capital Connect, the other on London Underground. What do you think they mean?

Right, I’m struggling a bit with this. My redesign is coming on: I’ve done the grid and the CSS seems to be working ok (in FireFox and Webkit at any rate). But I’m having a little trouble getting the text to align to the grid. I’ve tried working it out for myself because I was [...]

I get very confused by other people’s explanations of how to set online type to a baseline grid, so I tried from scratch. This post just shows the grid, I’ll get onto typography later.

I’m having another go at redesigning this blog, this time based firmly on a modular em-based grid.

mySociety wants a badge for PledgeBank for adding to blogs and websites, so I had a crack at it.