Wow. This has been a long time coming. Little did I know 10 months would expire following the original announcement before the book would be available for purchase.

This is the book I was desperately seeking two years ago when I began researching the mobile web.

This is the book that, contrary to most mobile web books/resources already published, contains more than 40 full-color screens from several mobile devices (including iPhone).

This is the book whose utility I've been able to validate along the way, answering questions by email and in person by literally copying and pasting or by pulling up the latest draft of the book on the spot.

This is the book that includes what I feel is only the most important and relevant information -- roughly one-third the length of most tech books, but I believe every bit as thorough and helpful as lengthier volumes. In fact, a number of pages were deliberately removed prior to completion because I felt they simply didn't make the cut.

This is the book for which I don't think I could be more pleased with the outcome (woohoo!).

And this is the book that you can own on August 28, available for immediate purchase in PDF format beginning that day.

You'll be entered to win an iPhone 8GB (among other gifts) if you're one of the first buyers, but of course you're savvy enough to recognize the real value is in the text, not the giveaways. But hey, giveaways make it all that more enjoyable, do they not?

See you in a couple weeks.

I’ve designed a new wallpaper after a long time. It’s called aForestation. I’ve also submitted it to Phirebrush.

Download links:
1024×768
1600×1200
3200×2400

I have decided to do away with the web design services from aside’s portfolio and focus more on the remaining design strengths, namely branding and corporate identity / logo design, print design and photography. I have just finished with my first fashion shoot as well.

No more website templates, HTML or CSS unless of course I’m changing some of my personal websites or designing a website for a friend. I am currently working on three website projects, once I deliver and close those, I will not be taking on any more web projects.

The web projects portfolio will stay on the blog but I will remove the same from the main website.

(If you don’t know what Blueprint is, read this first.)

Pencils down, let’s ship this thing, and bring print design on the web one step closer, as the first release of Blueprint is quickly closing in on 15 000 downloads.

Please read that back to me. The first point-release of a framework, built on a technology that behaves differently in most browsers, with known, gaping holes, has been downloaded almost 15 000 times. If there ever was a time for a new release, this would be it.

Version 0.3 also produced this statement from Khoi Vinh, online design director for The New York Times, and chief catalyst for bringing grid-based designs to the web:

“Is there a way I can turn Blueprint into traffic for Subtraction.com?

Enter version 0.4

Here’s most of the changes at a glance. Scroll down for explanations and clarifications.

• All font sizes and vertical margins are now elastic, through the use of em units. Resizing works great in every tested browser.
• Comes with a new, compressed version of BP, which reduces the size of the core files by 60 percent.
• Support for incremental leading, contributed by Mark Boulton.
• Adds perfected CSS buttons, by Kevin Hale of Particletree fame.
• Fixes all known IE bugs.
• Loads of minor fixes and additions.

I’d say this qualifies as a good, nay, make that a great release. Remember that BP now has taken on a life of its own, and that many of these changes have been contributed by people all over the globe. Be sure to check out BP’s contributors section.

Also, if you have a great fix or addition, post it to the new Blueprint Google Group.

About the changes

Now for a few, hopefully clarifying notes on some of the changes.

Elastic font sizes also means elastic line-heights, and as you may know, calculation of em’s in browsers are inconsistent at best. Because of this, I’ve taken the idealistic approach.

The line-heights (and by extension, the baseline) are set to values that should make them look quite perfect. In Firefox, for instance, they do. In Safari or Opera however, the baseline is a bit off.

This is a problem, but I am working on it, and I’m not even sure you’ll notice it at the default font size. :)

Contributed by print designer extraordinaire Mark Boulton, Incremental leading is a pretty exciting new feature. As most of the ideas in Blueprint, this one comes from the world of print design.

Say you have a sidebar, with smaller type than your main column. Having the same line-height in this column as in your main column might be a bad idea, as this implies a relationship between the content in each column that might not be there.

Enter incremental leading: This sets the ratio between the lines of the two columns to be 4:5, meaning that for 4 lines of text in the main column, you get 5 lines of text in the sidebar. Follow the link above to learn more about this technique.

The new compressed version is an absolute must for high-volume sites. It strips the core files of the framework down to 40% of their original size, mostly through removing comments and whitespace. Check out screen.css for information on how to use it.

And that’s that

I think this is a release one with great confidence can use on a live site, especially now that the glaring IE bugs are fixed. There might, however, be undiscovered bugs, so be on the lookout for a possible 0.4.5 release.

I’d just like to take this moment to thank all the people who have commented on, written about, contributed to, or mailed me about Blueprint. Your enthusiasm, ideas for features, bug fixes, and willingness to overlook obvious flaws in the first release has been nothing short of amazing. So thanks!

If you’d like to contribute or comment on BP, please send me an e-mail: olav at bjorkoy dot com.

Still here? Head on over to the Blueprint site to read about this new release, or just grab yourself a copy.

Credits

As always, please remember that BP is based on work by the following people:

• Jeff Croft
• Nathan Borror
• Christian Metts
• Eric Meyer

The new BP logo was created by Ludwig Wendzich.

Fadtastic founder Andy Faulkner has interviewed me on my design process and approach. See the results here: Fadtastic Interview: Matt Davies On Design Process.

Any comments or questions either ask over at fadtastic or leave a comment below. Would love to hear from you…

Ok, this kind of nonsense, which I will share with you in a moment, makes me wonder if there is anyway to turn off a person's oxygen support. If we can pull food tubes then dammit we need a way to prevent scum sucking thieves from wasting any more of our precious supply of oxygen. Like those heart-plug thingies from Dune, but for a person's air supply.

Consider that theft and forgery are a form of devolution and as I do not have a deep desire to head back to the trees and start grooming the hairy back of the monkey sitting next to me, I think it's our duty to fight these infringements upon the law, common sense, and decency.

Someone who goes by the handle allig8torx (that's Alligator X apparently) took it upon themselves to go to File magazine, copy, paste, and publish other people's photographs as their own. For example: Paul Russell's "Charity" and Alligator X's "Charity". Another: Byron Barrett's very lovely piece, "Untitled" and then Alligamouthbreather's curious doppleganger "astica3".

Sadly there are more, many more.

Unfortunately there is no option in Flickr to request that this person's sexual reproduction organs be removed so as to prevent the blood line from continuing but there should be, this is web 2.0 after-all.

If you couldn’t get tickets for dConstruct, or if you’re planning to stick around Brighton, you may be interested in the BarCamp we’re running that weekend.

For the uninitiated, BarCamps are self organised unconferences where everybody gets a chance to present a session or chair a discussion. This may sound daunting, but everybody’s in the same boat and you’ll be presenting to a small group of people who are really interested in what you’ve got to say. So if you’re really passionate about a particular topic, or fancy yourself as a bit of a speaker, BarCamp could be the perfect opportunity for you.

BarCamp isn’t just a web design event, so you can talk about anything remotely relating to geek culture. At previous events people have spoken about everything from hardware hacking to improvisational comedy, from astronomy to owl noises. As long as it’s interesting and you don’t just pimp your own kool-aid, you should be good.

Registration for BarCamp opens on Wednesday 8th August at 11am and tickets are going to fly off the shelves. Because numbers are limited, please only register if you’re happy to do a talk and plan to stay for both days. Otherwise you’ll be preventing somebody else from attending, which isn’t cool. Oh, and remember that it’s the dConstruct party the night before, so if you’re planing on cultivating a serious hang-over, you may want to let somebody else have your place.

Which Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) layout is best? All have their quirks and their unique pros and cons. Is one more accessible than the other? More usable? What are the drawbacks and how are they dealt with? Is one easier to create than the other? Is there an evil, inaccessible layout? I suspect some will say yes to this, but I'm not going to. I like them all and feel all are suitable if steps are taken to ensure easy usability and equal accessibility. All are part of a web site's presentational layer, so most of the accessibility relies on the extractable semantics and proper usage of the underlying mark-up. What follows is my take on the rigid fixed, the adaptable fluid, and the expandable elastic layouts.

I’ve been shooting pictures with my Nokia N72 for about six months now. In a recent hardware failure, I lost all the pictures I had taken since the month of March this year [ apart from a lot of other resources! ]. There were many images I had thought I’d put on this design blog - as a design reference or some form of inspiration or simply something interesting to look at. Without further ado, I am going to put up interesting shots at the end of every month or whenever I think have a fair number of interesting photographs.

Most of the photographs above have a Blue/Sepia split-toning filter and a couple of the photographs use a Yellow-Light filter. And the last two use no filters.