I’m a designer, working with the web and with print. I specialise in producing standards-compliant, usable sites. This site is a showcase for my work: visit the portfolio section for examples of the final results and, for a more in-depth look, read one of the case studies.
While the site’s up, there’s still a lot of work to be done to get the CSS working properly and to get all the outlying content into shape and online. In the meantime, reprocessed.org is still around and in need of updating. You can find PDFs of, and URLs for, my work there, though it’s a little out of date.
In other news, the book I’ve been working on, CSS: Separating content from presentation, is out. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears were poured into this book, mostly by Owen, Eric, and Steve. We think it’s a useful book – and some other people seem to agree with us – which is nice! Simply put, it’s a real-world guide to making use of CSS, and to moving from <font> and <table> layouts to CSS.
I’m an independent designer, based in Reading, England. I work in both web and print design, though I don’t consider them to be essentially the same medium: I appreciate the different challenges and opportunities afforded by each, and work with those differences.
I trained as a typographer at the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, transferring to the Typography department after a year in the Cybernetics department studying, oddly enough, Cybernetics. The insights I gained in cybernetics translated well into typography. I maintain that two disciplines share a lot of common ground, and theory abstracted from one can prove very useful when applied to the other.
My priorities, as a designer, lie with producing objects that work: websites which are easy to use and allow the user to do the thing they wanted to do on the site; print objects which allow the reader to read, which communicate what they ought, and allow the user (with forms, for example) to work with the object effectively.
I work with web standards to create things for the web, and I’m beginning to work more extensively with structured text (SGML and XML) for print projects and single-source projects going out to print and web. I’m a strong advocate of using open standards to get things done.
PortfolioI’m currently working to get some recent examples of my work online. at reprocessed.org/portfolio/ there are some older examples. I’ll move some of these across as time permits. To give you an idea of the kinds of work I’m involved with, I’ve just finished working on the conference publication for DIS2002, working with Nico Macdonald, and several others. I’ve been working with Text Matters on anXForms-based e-forms project.
I’m planning to write up some of my work in case study form, which may take a while... Currently I’m planning to write about the design and development of reprocessed.org, and the back-end development of the Reading University Department of Typography website.
Again, this section is waiting on some content, so I’ll just plug my book again: CSS: Separating content from presentation. At least plugging a book in a section about articles is vaguely relevant.
Until the snazzy form-based mail interface is up you’ll have to make do with a plain old mailto link: Email me.
copyright 2002, Matthew Patterson; validate: xhtml | css
problems: site@emdash.co.uk