A bunch of updates and a new weekly

It took a little bit over a year to realize that I definitely need and want to update this website. So much has happened during the last year and while it would have been great to put everything into words I look forward to do it from now on. I simply want to write more often – and not only about design, my work or web related stuff. I want to see this website as an open playground to try out new things, as a kind of personal log and a hobby.

The weekly will be back

In 2015 I started writing little weekly updates with interesting websites I found, some updates on the job and so on. I try to do that again. First of all it gives me some writing practice and it is helpful to store interesting stuff for later. Bookmarks never really worked so well for me. It’s more interesting to browse through old stuff that you wrote years ago.

Website updates

When I made the decision to update this website I thought about relaunching it from scratch. Everything should be new and awesome and polished and smooth and whatever. Bollocks. When I looked into the code of my previous website I found that it was quite ok and it just needed a little update here and there. Also why should I remove all old articles and lose valuable backlinks, haha. When I read old articles I am always a little ashamed, but it’s also funny, so I just keep it here.
The website is still based on GetKirby which works great. I thought about moving to a CMS like Craft but I really don’t need all that power for my personal gibberish. Also GetKirby is nice and small and very flexible, so I can easily add more stuff if I want to.

What I also want to put here

Apart from designing websites I also like to cook from time to time and I even started a food blog some time ago. To everyone’s surprise – I stopped uploading recipes because I couldn’t find the time, or the recipe was not good enough. I asked myself, why I really want to do that and came to the conclusion that I want to do it for myself. And, if some people like to cook one of my recipes the better! But, I don’t want to maintain two websites, so I will integrate my food blog here soon. Right now it’s on Squarespace and I payed money for it. #yolo
If someone wants to buy the awesome blog domain for some thousand euros, please DM me somewhere!

I have more ideas to add to this website, but I don’t want to promise anything, so you just have to check back from time to time.

Weekly

I was on holidays the last two weeks, but still browsed the internet. So here are some interesting websites for you to check out, if you did not find them already.

While Invision buys every design related company that’s out there, they also publish really great design resources for free from time to time. You should definitely check out their guides to great product design.

type.today is a nice online shop for great fonts, that is worth checking out. Not as nice as the online shop we at diesdas built for TypeMates, but still … I also bought my website’s font ‘Graphik’ there.

The website is already out there for a while, but the design techniques from Area17 are some of the best I have seen so far. I especially find it astounding that they apparently manage to roll out these techniques for the whole company. Chapeaux!

If you work in an agency and you look at your colleagues design files, you know – it’s a mess. Abstract tries to solve that by applying a kind of GitHub approach on design files. We try to implement that into our design workflow at diesdas, but after some time with it, I have the feeling that it just adds another layer of complexity. If you have a solid process for your design work as done by Area17, you don’t need an app to structure your files I think. Also it’s a bummer, that it’s only available for Sketch.

When Slack was introduced, everyone was excited about this new tool that is a better alternative to emails. After some years of using it I wonder whether we just bought the wolf in sheep’s clothing. More on that in a different article, but – TwistApp addresses some of my problems with Slack and I definitely want to take it for a spin.

Maybe you have heard about Ghost, the publishing platform before. When I started working on my website, I also thought about using it but went ahead with Kirby. But, it looks and feels very good and I want to try it again soon. Any positive or negative experiences with it? Write me on Twitter, I definitely want to know more about it!

Alright. That’s it for this week. I hope to see you soon and enjoy your Sunday!