Alex has been doing cruel and unusual things to CSS since 2001. He is the lead front-end design and dev for SitePoint and one-time SitePoint's Design and UX editor with over 150+ newsletter written. Co-author of The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. Now Alex is involved in the planning, development, production, and marketing of a huge range of printed and online products and references. He has designed over 60+ of SitePoint's book covers.
Alex's articles
While Tom Cruise energetically 'vogued' his way through in the UI in Minority Report, low-energy eye-tracking interfaces look more promising in the future.
Often it's the small, random details in a story that make it feel authentic. Advertising great David Ogilvy understood the value of great storytelling.
Designers have always borrowed from other sources, but 'fair use' is a hard idea to pin down. Jeff Koons thought he had an air-tight defence. He didn't.
Sometimes you can create something new by taking away. Here are 2 great examples where a new story is created by photoshopping out parts of the original.
Has the flat design revolution left you feeling a little... flat? Sometimes a teaspoon of gritty, printy goodness can give a clinical design a lift.
Read Should You Be Brave with Your Typography? Ask Mr. Robot. and learn with SitePoint. Our web development and design tutorials, courses, and books will teach you HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and more.
From Casablanca to Game of Thrones, maps have been used to help tell stories. AMCharts Pixel Map Editor lets you create customized SVG maps with ease.
A blank page can be a cruel taskmaster. Sometimes randomness is a good way to route around your normal design habits into new ideas.
Alex Walker explains what he looks for in an article intro and details how to write one for yourself together.
While designers seem to like it, Google's new logo has been compared to Comic Sans in some quarters. Why are we seeing such a wide discrepancy in opinion?
The Facebook Friends icon was telling a story from another era – until designer Caitlin Winner stepped in.
Often it's the flaws in a technology – the brush strokes, the audio hiss – that we celebrate most. Khoi Vin celebrates the halftone in his latest design.
Like hand-holds on a climbing wall, paragraphs give us an obvious path to traverse a wall of text - except when we they get lost on a small screen.
Read Boom! The Sound of a Perfect Idea Landing and learn with SitePoint. Our web development and design tutorials, courses, and books will teach you HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and more.
New technologies have a way of shaking up the status quo and there's usually someone not happy about it.
Vectors are a great option for icons but the decision between icon fonts and SVG is a hard one. Now Seren Davies has raised some new issues with icon fonts.
Cognitive dissonance is that feeling you get when a picture frame is 3 degrees off square. Learn to use it without getting used by it.
Gamification can be a great way to engage a user base. But sometimes it can accidently work against you – as LEGO found out.
Intellectual property is a challenge that's only getting curlier with time and the extended reach of the internet. Neither is going away any time soon.
A banana can tell us when it's no longer good to eat without needing text or even and LED. Can we use this idea in our UI design?
What if you could make a working prototype just by sketching your app and then photographing it with your phone? Appseed does just that.
Steve Jobs liked simple design, but he wasn't simple-minded. Alex looks at U.S. Presidents and the important differences between dumb and simple.
Designers always know how they think the web should work. Userstyles are the best way to re-engineer your internet just the way you like it.
The ancient Sumerians were the first data nerds, and understood the beauty of tabular data. But how do we keep the power of HTML tables on small screens?
Are we born knowing how to see, or do we learn by experience? It turns out kittens have taught us much about how our brains work.
There's a good argument that the skull and crossbones is one of the most enduring graphic designs of the last 1,000 years. Does it still work?
Writing software can seem cool and abstracted until you realise the impact your code can have. Therac-25 was a tragic example of how bad code hurts people.
It's hard to imagine how Illustrator could be improved until you see what a good plugin can do. Simone shows us his favorite plugins for Adobe Illustrator
While technological brings inevitable negatives, sometimes we're too quick to romanticize the times 'before tech made us antisocial'.
We program our computers but maybe they program us too? Alex looks at how working on the web changes the way we think.