Along with (yet another) redesign, I decided to collect all my old blog designs together for posterity. The thing that surprised me is my own progression in design terms. I would still find it difficult to call myself a designer in any sense but I will admit that I'm a bit better now than I was back when I started this site.

Note: this is just a gallery of the previous designs for the blog incarnation of this site. The site itself existed for quite a while before that when it hosted my two webcomics “Things in Jars” and “Scene & Herd”.

These are all simply themes that were applied to the base CMS ‘Dooze’.

Previous blog themes

• Dooze (2007-2009)
• Underwater Slate (2009-2010)
• Felt (2010-2011)
• Desk (2011-?)

When I was a young game designer wannabe living in St Andrews, I interviewed with a company in Manchester. For years, this was my biggest travel time:interview time ratio in that I got up shortly before 6, took a taxi, train and different train to get there by 1, had a 15 minute interview and then took two trains and a bus to get home by 11pm 1.

Now, the ratio is still unbeaten (31:1) but I have now definitely overtaken the basic numbers. I've recently travelled to Berlin twice to interview with Nokia's Ovi offices. I have since come to the conclusion that there is some mysterious force at work who really doesn't like me travelling through Schiphol. Note: I don't mean an omniscient being, I mean some actual arch enemy.

Trip one

Leaving on a Tuesday afternoon, I jumped on a plane at Edinburgh Airport to Amsterdam Schiphol then changed onto a plane to Berlin Tegel. I eventually arrived at my hotel in Berlin around 11pm. After checking in, hanging up my interview shirt and scrubbing my face to get rid of the sheen of fellow air passengers, it was after midnight. Not the best prep for a full day of interviews, to be honest. The next morning, I got up, tried to partake of a German breakfast of rye bread and wurst, settled for a croissant and coffee and headed out into the -10°C weather. I won't go into the details of the interview process but by the end of the day, I'd been interviewed by 8 different people, drunk two pots of coffee myself and been told that I don't look particularly German. Not being German, I thought this statement was accurate.

I left the office, caught a taxi back to the airport and relaxed safe in the knowledge that I'd be back in Edinburgh in a few hours. An incorrect assumption, it would seem.

I arrived in plenty time to double-check the flights were all okay. There was even a flight to Schiphol before mine that some passengers were offered the chance to catch. I was relaxed, it was fine, I wasn't in a hurry, I'll catch the next one. Several hours later, I regretted that decision. The second flight was held in Schiphol before coming to Tegel due to broken air conditioning. By the time it had landed, turned round and let us board, I should have already been half way to Edinburgh and had missed the last connection. Boo.

One over night in a hotel later, I finally made it back to Edinburgh at 8am. Approximately 40 hours after I left. About 5.7:1.

Trip two

When it came to my second round of face-to-face interviews, I wasn't lucky enough to get an overnight stay, unfortunately. I had to get to Berlin and back in a day. The 2.45am start would have been bad enough under any circumstances but when you have a teething 5-month old and have generally been running on empty for the best part of 2 months, it very nearly killed me. Still...

Edinburgh to Schiphol � fine; Schiphol to Tegel � also fine. I arrived at the office only 3 minutes late for my 12 o�clock interview which isn't too bad after travelling about 800miles. Three hours of geek talk later, I'm back in the taxi on the way to Tegel, snapping photos out the taxi windows just to prove I was there. This time there's no delay at Tegel and I land in Amsterdam with about 2 hours to make it to my gate. I'm not exactly a relaxed traveller so I'm not the kind who can go via the airport pub, have a sit-down meal and casually meander to the gate in time to board. I'm more inclined to high-speed sprints and panicked departure board-scanning just to make sure I get to the gate several hours early so I can sit and do nothing. That's exactly what I did. I got to the gate in plenty of time to see the �Flight delayed� ticker come up. Plenty of time to watch the �Estimated Departure� go from 21:00 to 22:00 to 23:00 to 00:00. It was when it flashed �00:30� it finally decided to stop.

I made it back to Edinburgh around 1am and got back to my house around 2.30am. Just in time to pick up Oskar as another night of painful teething screams started off, in fact. 7:1, this time.

So, after almost 2 years at National Museums Scotland, I'm moving on. And not just me, Jenni's coming too (and Oskar, of course).

After delivering a kick-ass, ground-breaking website and implementing some cool shiny stuff, I feel confident I can move on having made a bit of a difference. I initially took the job for two main reasons:

1. To bring advanced web-awesome to the cultural sector
2. To prove my technical ability to myself at an international level

I'm happy I've done that. The National Museums Scotland site looks a lot nicer above and below the surface than it did when I and the rest of the web team arrived in 2009. Hopefully the systems and techniques I've put in place will ensure it stays at the front edge of the culture sector in terms of well-considered use of technology. The rest of the web team are still there, of course, and will continue to make cool stuff. I'll be satisfying my urge to build cool cultural stuff by providing the tech behind the various Museum 140 projects.

The second reason is just as important. Working on a large national organisation website made me triple-check everything I wrote but my desire to build ‘Cool Stuff’ meant that I couldn't play it too safe. Favourable reviews from .NET magazine and ReadWriteWeb suggest that we got the balance right.

Personal projects

In the last 12 months, I've also had a fair amount of success with my various personal tech projects – 8bitalpha, harmonious, The Elementals, Whithr, Shelvi.st as well as being a featured case study on phonegap.com. All of which have served to remind me I like the challenge of doing something beyond what I can already do.

Where now, then?

Now is the right time to step up from the top half of the First Division to somewhere in the middle of the Premier League (yeah, that's right, sport analogies). I'm going to be starting in July as Senior CSS Developer at Nokia in Berlin. I'll be working on the desktop interface for the services that used to be ovi.com (until a couple of weeks ago) building interface frameworks and UI components.

Nokia have been going through a bunch of changes recently so I'm excited to be joining them now when there's a great opportunity to make a significant difference on a big scale.

I've only been to Berlin twice (an upcoming blog post will give more details about that) and, despite being German, Jenni's never been so it'll be an interesting move. Berlin does, however, have over 170 museums so if there's anywhere Jenni can perform her particular brand of museum-wizardry, it'll be there. We've asked Oskar's opinion but he's not saying much. He's mostly drooling.

Über-curricular activities

I'm also hoping to give more conference talks and presentations (like yesterday's) as well as write more educational articles for this blog and others. I've got a few written that I've not had the chance to present anywhere so I might put them here at some point.

If you have any questions, throw a tweet in my direction.

Your country needs you...

...to stand at the cutting edge of technology.

Sounds awfully impressive, don't you think?

There are quite a few regulations to bear in mind and comply with when developing a website for a Government organisation or any large public body. This has lead to a lot of sites being developed in a very defensive manner, ensuring safe compliance at the expense of a great and consistent user experience.

This video features a presentation about how large publicly-liable institutions should and can embrace the latest in web technologies without sacrificing standards. By embracing them, in fact.

The content of this was developed while planning and building the National Museums Scotland website which launched last November. The messages presented are applicable to museums, galleries, swimming pools, councils, anywhere, really.

If you're a techie person in the cultural or government sector, you might find this useful in convincing others to take advantage of the latest cool (and useful) technologies.

Video

HTML5 for Large Public Bodies from Simon Madine on Vimeo.

Links from the presentation

• PolyFills
• .NET magazine article
• (Almost) complete list of polyfills
• Dive into HTML5
• HTML5 Boilerplate
• Smashing Magazine
• HTML5 Doctor
• AlphaGov

Slideshow

The source for the slides is available online although it's mostly webkit-friendly. I realise the irony of a presentation about cross-platform HTML5 not being a great example itself of that but it does degrade adequately. If I get the time in the future, I'll tidy it up. An actual good (and relevant) example of cross-platform web technologies is the National Museums Scotland website itself which performs fantastically across all manner of platforms.