Reusable D3: Book, Demo, Slides. And A Little on MVC

Finally, the D3 book is out, a book that focuses on how to write reusable D3 using a component and module based approach, and a book that also provides a very detailed thoroughly worked up example (as well as a large set of other examples). Moving To a Model-View-Controller Model One of the key impacts […]

Serif vs Sans-serif

Inspired by the infographic shown on Urbanfonts.com, we thought we’d throw in our two pence worth on this topic. So … Which is better to use and when, serif type or sans-serif type? This debate that has raged in the minds of designers (and procrastinating students) for decades. Is there a winner in this war? […]

Charting & Visualisation in a Refined Way

Here at Refined Practice we’ve been busy working away on a little project involving the D3.js javascript library. D3.js provides a large set of tools to help visualise data online in the form of interactive visualisation, charts and diagrams. We love D3.js, it’s great – in fact founding partner Roland Dunn loves it so much […]

Experiment and Create To Build a Healthier Online Brand

Following on from our piece in this week’s Marketing Week we wanted to continue the discussion regarding creativity and experimentation, particularly relating to website content and how this can increase your number of visitors. Why Experiment? The use of data analysis and research using tools like Google Analytics and focus groups is an essential part […]

Never mind Facebook, connect me with your content!

I was quite interested reading the latest rant from David Mitchell as he managed to hit upon a pet hate of mine when it comes to the internet. In his article, Mitchell discusses “Visit England” and their “101 things to do before you go abroad” list. In these times of economic woe Visit England should […]

Brief Trip to ionSearch 2013: Geo-location, E-Commerce and More

Another year, and another trip to ionSearch, a web optimisation conference up in Leeds, UK. This time sadly a brief visit, just the Thursday and only the latter half of it. You can probably still get a sense of what’s been happening via the #ionsearch hash tag. Multi-lingual Sites and Geo-Location I only saw a […]

Designing with a grid

You may think that the layout of any particular design is purely left to the designers whim and, although some elements may be nicely aligned, mostly they are placed on the page or screen wherever the designer feels like it. In many cases you’d be right, but this is not how things should be … […]

More SVN Code Snippets: Adding All New Files, Deleting All Removed Files

As we have mentioned before, we use Subversion to manage our codebase. That includes our WordPress set up with all its preferred and custom plugins. So, what’s the best way to update a plugin when it’s in your Subversion repository? The approach we take (which you might find handy) is to: Download the new version […]