Chris Tebbit
Web Design and Development ¶

Qualifications and everything ¶

08 Sep 2008

Despite this being my website, all about me, I feel it's a bit self-absorbed to go on about myself too much - a slightly strange perspective on my own site I know, but there we go. I would hope the work would do the talking for me.
 
Regardless, I'm sure a bit of information about my qualifications and career to date wouldn't go amiss, so now is as good a time as any to rectify that.
 
The full information overload is in my curriculum vitae, but for a quick run down, here goes...
 
I graduated from Nottingham Trent University in the slightly warm summer of 2007 with an especially warm first class honours degree in Multimedia, making me a batchelor of the arts donchaknow.
 
Prior to that I studied an Art and Design Foundation at the University of Portsmouth, specialising in Communication Design, which is Graphic Design to you and me. I recall the weather was particularly nice then, as was the 'merit' I was awarded for my hard work.
 
There's a host of A-Levels, GCSEs and a BTEC as well, but I can't remember what the weather was like for those, so the full details have been relegated to my CV.
 
I hope that clears things up, as always, get in touch if you want to know more, except what the weather is like, I'd rather not talk about it.

And then there were four ¶

02 Aug 2008

So Google today have (accidentally) announced their Google Chrome web browser, which has the potential to be an intriguing development. Given their support (not just financially) of the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox project, launching a competing browser seems like a strange move.
 
Given Google's business position as essentially a carrier for advertising, this raises further concerns over privacy and the harvesting of data. Already many of their products hold unreasonable demands buried in their terms and conditions regarding the persistence of data, and despite their mantra of 'do no evil', can you trust a monolith of that scale to stick to it, or if control of the company shifted towards one of the many corporations who would love to get a hold of the user data they have accumulated. Developing their own browser seems like it has the potential for further tracing and harvesting of browsing habits. With luck, their promise of making the browser open-source should ensure a certain level of protection, though there's no telling what details their 'phishing' filter gleans from users of Chrome, or even Firefox.
 
Some of the technology behind it sounds pretty interesting though, especially the multi-threaded tabs idea, that ensures the processes in one browser tab will not compromise the stability of the whole application - a critical flaw given the increasing dominance of web based applications. Hopefully this concept will will catch on elsewhere.
 
I'm in two minds about the competitive aspect of it. On the one hand more competition to Internet Explorer, and in general, is good if it's standards compatible. But given Firefox's position as it is now, I think most people who would move away from IE to a real browser probably already will have, while most of the people of a less tech-savvy persuasion who get their computer home from the shop will be sticking with IE since that's the option they have been presented with. Could Google be bolstering the alternative options to Internet Explorer, or simply dividing and further confusing the alternatives? On the other hand, given Google's presence, it has some serious potential to reach those users who would not normally think of using anything other than the pre-loaded browsers that came with their computer - which could well open the previously closed doors to other browser developers.
 
Chrome, which is still only in beta remember, could be the big shake up that the so called ‘browser wars' has needed, perhaps forcing Firefox to finally make the changes it has sorely needed for many versions in order to stay relevant, opening the playing field to potentially hundreds of options across many platforms.
 
As for the impact this will have on the web development community, we'll just have to wait and see. As we've seen over the last ten to fifteen years, the rise of a single technology to set the standard rather than adhere to it causes nothing but headaches for users and developers alike. On the other hand, having to develop for many potential standards, each interpreting the standards differently, could be as much of a headache. At least one benefit I can see straight away is Chrome's use of the WebKit rendering engine, as used in Apple's Safari, which in my opinion is one of the best renderers currently in mainstream use, and encouraging developers to take this platform seriously.

Just how many more quirks? ¶

15 Aug 2008

I regularly suspect that I spend a disproportionate amount of my time pandering to the needs of one particular niche of technology. And I'm sure that anyone with even a passing familiarity with web design will know exactly what niche that is - Internet Explorer. Alright, it's a pretty large niche as they go.
 
I'm at a loss as to why Microsoft, who don't have an excuse for why they developed such a poorly compatible browser suite in the first place, given that they cannot have been ignorant of these standards, would have shipped a product that was so completely flawed. Unless that was their intention in the first place, to allow their preeminent product to set the standards rather than vice versa, for the purposes of commercial gain.
 
With the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft are promising greater standards compatibility (I'm sure they said that when IE7 was shambolically released), but only if you opt-in to it, which seems like quite the opposite of standards compatibility to me. Hopefully it is a start on the road to standards being standards, rather than the vague guidelines they are so regularly interpreted as.
 
Despite these recent developments, much of the web will continue in this limbo of mixed compatibilities for years to come. Microsoft have only just managed to get the majority off its users off the really-broken IE6 (now seven years old - excuse the cliche, but that's a lifetime in web years), onto the slightly-less-broken-but-still-not-quite-right IE7.
 
And as for IE8, which from what I can make out so far requires me to add code to my page to tell it to render compliantly, who knows what shambles that will cause. At the very least I hope it will improve it's text rendering, I can and have worked around the many other problems it has presented me.

New Site ¶

21 Jul 2008

I've been saying it, starting and restarting it for months now, but time has been in short supply of late, clients getting priority over my ego's space on the internet. Finally however, I've got my new website up and running, as you can probably see from there - hello - I hope you like it.

I ♥ white space ¶

16 Jul 2008

I'm not all that into complaining about things, there's always a bright side, even to the bright side, though if things keep getting brighter all the squinting makes things less good again, but luckily there's still a bright side to that, some how.
 
Moaning, as well as a great tradition on this overcast isle (alongside queuing, and complaining about queuing), is also cathartic, so I just want to vent briefly about misunderstanding white space.
 
White space is an essential to good design, filling every available space in a medium is just plain bad, bad, bad. It looks cluttered, busy and just plain difficult to read, whatever economy comes into play when deciding to fill a space to its limit doesn't pay off when noone's going to read what's there. When it comes to web design, this process is unexcusable, since there's no physical limitation to force one page to be filled to capacity.
 
As I said, I'm normally of the sunshine and lollipop's disposition, but I've just spent the afternoon being informed I've left 'gaps' on a page, and that it is essential they are filled with something. I'm expecting a request for an animated GIF any moment.
 
Normal positivity will be resumed in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...oh look, the sun's just come out.

I Dress Myself completed ¶

01 Apr 2008

I think everyone could be excused for suspecting this is an April-fools joke, given the time it's taken, but I'm thoroughly excited to finally see I Dress Myself's new website finally online. You can take a look at the finished site in all its glory at www.idressmyself.co.uk and read more about the production in my web design portfolio.

Fine Art 2007 DVD ¶

07 Jun 2007

I worked (rather hecticly) on the DVD for the Nottingham Trent Fine Art degree show a few weeks ago, and it came back from the duplication people today.
 
It's included with the amazing looking catalogue for their degree show which is available from the exhibition opening tomorrow.