Hollidazed

I had a great break with all my family down in Cornwall last week and just about managed to keep away from the world of web.

I did however make time to read Cameron Moll‘s new Mobile Web Design book. It was a nice short read while on holiday but what it lacked in length it certainly made up for in quality. It’s great to have a book on the Mobile Web that takes a web standards approach and offers some great real world solutions for offering mobile web content.

The day after finishing Mobile Web Design, Apple announced their new range of iPod’s including the new ‘touch’ model – fully equipped with WiFi and Safari. Although the iPhone looks and sounds fantastic (and will hopefully arrive in the UK eventually) I think that it will generally only be taken up by a small group of users in the short term… on the other hand the iPod touch is something that everybody will want and will probably be this years Christmas top seller. Surely this now means that there will be a mass market created of mobile web users equipped with a standards based browser (Safari). This to me is a really exciting development for the web and will open up mobile development. So having been inspired by the book I’m ready to get into it and start looking at the possibilities …back to work then!

Well Christmas has long since passed and so has the opportunity for a proper yearly review of 2006 (well, it is nearly February after all!).

The start of the year has been pretty busy so far and in a way it’s felt like I’ve still been finishing off 2006 with the recent official launch of a new site I’ve been working on since well before Christmas.

2006 was definitely the year of the web design/developers book for me in which I read all of the following:

• DOM Scripting – Jeremy keith
• Bulletproof Web Design – Dan Cederholm
• CSS Mastery – Andy Budd
• HTML Mastery – Paul Haine (just finished this, so it just sneaks in!)
• Head Rush Ajax – Brett McLaughlin
• Designing with Web Standards (Second Edition) – Jeffrey Zeldman

These books have really helped me in my understanding of building websites the right way using web standards with accessibility in mind and I feel like I’ve been on a massive learning curve up until now.

After spending so much time last year learning about the technical side of my job I think if I was going to have one resolution for 2007 it would be to actually focus on being a better designer this year, concentrating on really developing and applying graphic design principles into my work.

I now really want to focus on producing some great designs where web standards and good practice are embedded in my work while I also really want to make time to re-design this site.

For anyone else thinking they want to develop their graphic design skills I can definitely recommend the one book I will no doubt be reading this year, the upcoming Five Simple Steps: Designing for the web by Mark Boulton.