Craig Mason

I've just graduated with a 1st class honours in Digital Art & Technology... effectively new-media design. Give it 3-5 years, and everything I learned there will be obsolete. You're never too-old to become great in design / development sectors. I've been designing and coding since I was 14, yet I know people who started out 2 years ago that can create absolutely kick-ass interfaces and back-ends. Do remember that some developers and designers can be quite 'elitist' when they started at a young age. These are the same designers that think they are amazing at what they do. Obviously, starting to play Football at 24 with hopes of becoming a professional are a bit hard stretched. However, some pro golfers are relatively old and only started playing in their 30s. Don't listen to your mate Put the effort in, and you'll be up there. It's a lot easier to improve your skills nowadays with open-source culture.

1024 with is definitely the best width to aim for nowadays. FYI, the BBC's new homepage is set for 1024 screens. I usually design content at around the 900-950 mark

Depends on the media... I usually use Arial / Tahoma / Georgia a lot for web text. My business logo uses Interstate, which is a nice modern sans-serif that isn't too corporate

Wise words... I'll pass on the knowledge!

My family say that I've picked up a few of the quirky parts of the south-western accent... and that I sometimes say my 'R's like a pirate!

Oxford's still nice, but I'm only really there to visit the family nowadays. The house prices and living costs in Oxford are terrible, so I'm currently in Plymouth living with a few more pennies to spare!

I usually say "My Ess Cue Ell". Many people refer to Microsoft SQL server as 'sequel server', and I like to remove the ambiguity Fave Icon (As it is essentially a 'favourites icon') Goo Wee And some more... GIF: hard G, said as 'gif' JPEG: Jay Peg TIFF: 'tiff'

I think this stands for any industry. If somebody asks you for your opinion of a competitor, then it would be fine to give a measured response. But actively marketing against your competition by pointing out it's faults will probably do you more harm than good. You could refer to 'lacklustre' competitors, but I certainly wouldn't specify any companies directly.

ein2310's reply sounds like a good plan. I believe the reason I used Javascript was because I had a nested horizontal menu that displayed a sub-menu upon hover... Similar to: li ul:hover li { display: block; } At that point, the li failed, and I required Javascript to fix the hover. But certainly, displaying the anchor as block and applying a hover to that element will provide an elegant solution to this particular problem.

I know that li:hover fails on IE6. I have used some simple Javascript to fix that before. I'm pretty sure this script fixes this sort of issue also: http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/ Hope that helps, -Craig

Haha! I used to live there 3 years ago... St Thomas Court, it's called, just 2 seconds from Drake's Circus. It was actually our flat that started the trend when the building was first in use! I now live right next to the Uni

I believe this worked for me: 1) Wrap the whole page in a div. Set position: relative; 2) Add the css from the previous post to your footer 3) Add padding-bottom: 70px; to your #wrapper. I'm just off to bed, so I only looked at this really quickly. Sorry if it doesn't work properly for you

In that case.. add this to footer: #footer{ position: absolute; bottom: 0pt; width: 100%; } That should sort it EDIT: This may fail on the longer content pages... may need a little tweak. Looking into it now

I see your problem... when the body content is not high enough to push the footer down, there's an area of white space. For a simple fix, I'd do the following: Set the page background color to the same value as the bottom pixel of your footer background. Your footer will seemingly expand to fill the rest of the page. You would then need to create a wrapper for everything before your footer (possibly starting after your masthead) and set the background of that to white. Hope that helps, Craig

It's pretty nice down here nowadays! I've only been in Plymouth for 4 years due to University, but in that time alone I've seen some pretty big changes. A lot of the city centre has been redeveloped, including a huge shopping centre. The university is expanding exponentially, which seems to be developing the local economy. Lots of EU funding is helping with city development too I used to live right near the centre of Oxford (had done since birth), but I actually prefer the life down here at the moment. I'm about to look for a place to live in the next couple of months (living with student friends at the moment), so I'll soon see how nice the real rented properties are

Hi Guys, As with quite a few people today, I picked up on this forum from the Smashing Magazine post. I've actually been meaning to look into joining a UK-based design forum, but I've been extremely busy recently! A bit about my background... I'm 22, about to graduate in Digital Art & Technology from the University of Plymouth. I worked freelance for 16 months during a 'placement year' at university, going from 0 clients to holding a nice income. I'll be finished at university as of 15th May. From then on, I'll be working on developing a business and driving things forward! So... Hi! -Craig