Living style guides with Stylio
Stylio allows designers to manage visual components in a standalone application that integrates with Ruby on Rails applications. This allows design changes to be developed, reviewed and released with...
View ArticleSeparate your nginx web & puma application servers
Generally speaking, if you don’t have the luxury of using a PaaS such as Heroku and you’re trying to deploy a Rails app, there’s a certain amount of manual configuration with nginx using reverse...
View ArticleRoyal Opera House: Design Challenge 2016 Interactive – Functional, yet sexy
“A project working with the Royal Opera House” “It’s a stand-alone mini-site to help them promote their wealth of content” “It will need to be manually populated in its first phase” “It needs to be...
View ArticleDesign Drops #1
Here are a few useful bits of design related inspiration and toolage I’ve found over the past few weeks. Raindrop.io I’m an avid bookmarker, especially for nicely designed websites, illustrations and...
View ArticleCould you be our Head of Client Services?
£32 – £38k Based in Birmingham or London Monday to Friday, 9 – 5 We are looking for a talented and motivated individual to help us establish and deliver the company’s client services function. Over the...
View ArticleSubstrakt Health
We have always been interested in working with the Health sector, and have delivered several projects over the years which whet our appetite. Earlier this year came our big opportunity to give the...
View ArticleHow to: Debug GitLab CI Builds Locally
Your tests all pass locally. One test fails in your GitLab CI build. Sound familiar? Of course it does. This is painful work to resolve. You have to make single changes to your GitLab CI build file and...
View ArticleThinking about chatbots
Chatbots dominated new tech last year but what are they and how can an organisation start to think about making use of them? Anatomy of a Chatbot Modern chatbots are enabling natural language, either...
View ArticleDigital Works #1
I go to my fair share of conferences and have noticed that all of the best and most useful things are said in the coffee breaks, in the bar or…basically anywhere outside of the main, organised...
View ArticleDesign Drops #2
Here are a few useful bits of design related inspiration and toolage I’ve found over the past few weeks. reMarkable: e-Ink tablet & pen This caught my eye due to the fact that I swapped sketch...
View ArticleWhat makes ‘a good brief’– the agency perspective
I get asked for ‘examples of good briefs’ a lot. I’ve been on both sides of the fence with this one; having lead procurement for a variety of digital projects (in the arts, charity and higher education...
View ArticleMaking lists of logo images less awful
One of the most common design challenges I come across as a designer/developer is the Client/Supporter/Partner list of logos. These innocent lists of logos are perceived to be a simple addition to a...
View ArticleWhat makes ‘a good brief’– an agency perspective
I get asked for ‘examples of good briefs’ a lot so I thought it might be useful if we did a quick rundown on what we, as an agency, think goes into a good/useful/successful brief/rfp document. I’ve...
View ArticleBecoming a JavaScript Ninja
Used on 72% of all websites, it’s pretty safe to assume that most web developers will run into JavaScript from time to time. Albeit, in a variety of different shapes and sizes, such as jQuery, React,...
View ArticleOKRs at Substrakt
Having run a digital agency for over 10 years, the one thing I do know about is the importance of a good team (especially when you can’t design or develop a website yourself!). It is essential that we...
View ArticleOne month in…
Had you told me 3 months ago that I would be working for a digital agency, I would have laughed you all the way to the nearest cat cafe. Although, if you told me 6 years ago that I would spend the next...
View ArticleMy talk at Ticketing Professionals – APIs
I gave a talk at this year’s Ticketing Professionals conference – which advertises itself as “The Place Where Professionals Talk Ticketing”. It was rather vaguely titled ‘The API – what next for our 3...
View ArticleThe design process (is not a flow diagram)
Everyone likes diagrams, and everyone likes lists. Lists are easy. The process of designing websites at Substrakt, however, is not a neat production-line-style flow diagram; it doesn’t follow a linear...
View ArticleUser testing (or battling assumptions and the death of reason)
Everyone makes assumptions, I do, you do, everyone does. All the time. Look at us all, making an ass out of you and umptions. However it’s a problem when these assumptions make their way into your...
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