At the beginning of the month, a few friends and I attended Anthony Burrill‘s LongLunch talk at Edinburgh School of Art. Whilst I enjoyed most of his work, we all felt as though he failed to provide much rationale for his decisions. Perhaps we were being too analytical, but I do think it’d be good to see future LongLunch speakers present tighter case studies; showcasing the brief along with their solution. That said, I do enjoy LongLunch talks primarily because they’re out-with my comfort zone. I’ve picked up a few great ideas regardless of their rationale, and I’d certainly encourage more web designers to come along.

I took a positive step forward with regards to my finances this month, by signing up for a FreeAgent account. Even after only a week of using it, I’ve spent less time in Word (never a bad thing) and have a much clearer idea of my financial state. Best of all, it’s encouraged me to take stock of my outgoings, so I’m now paying less for my monthly phone bill and have cancelled a couple of unnecessary online subscriptions. Really looking forward to the control this great app will give me in the future.

If you’ve ever had to help out a friend or family member with computer issues (you work on the web, so you must know all about computers, right?), you know how irritating it can be to extract even the simplest of details from them remotely. The excellent Support Details could prove to be an invaluable tool should the situation arise again.

One of those things I can’t believe I’d never known about until now is Google Labs’ Browser Size, a very handy reference tool for seeing what is and what isn’t viewable on a web page at different viewport sizes.

Quicksand looks to be a potentially slick script for reordering and filtering list items with  ”a nice shuffling animation”. I’m keen to see how it’ll hold up with a lot more items, so if you get a chance to try it out, do let me know how you get on.

Inspired by Robert Bringhurst’s ‘The Elements of Typographic Style‘, Typograph is an interesting tool allowing you play around with the scale and vertical rhythm of text simply by dragging a few boxes around. You can then export your styles as CSS.