Unfinished Business

I’ve been looking forward to speaking with Cennydd Bowles for months and for Unfinished Business 113, Cennydd joins me and my other special guest, product designer Noah Stokes. We kick off by talking about Richard Rutter’s web typography book, but soon the conversation switches to whether, and why, current web designs are lacking ‘soul.’ This is something Noah and I have been speaking and writing over recent months and something that I partly blame on our fixation with user-experience and product design. Does Cennydd agree? You‘ll have to listen to the show to find out.

I want Unfinished Business to be, above all, entertaining and it makes me incredibly happy when entertainers take time to talk to me. This week, and after literally months of trying to set this up, my very special guest on Unfinished Business episode 112 is, actor, comedian, star of Vic and Bob’s ‘House Of Fools,’ Ellie White.

Apologies in advance if you’re German or a Turk, as this week on episode 111 of Unfinished Business, I’m joined by artist Brendan Dawes and designer Aaron Draplin.

Last week was Jeffrey Zeldman’s website’s 20th birthday, so this week he joins me and Jeremy Keith on Unfinished Business 110 to talk about the anniversary. We start by discussing Jeremy’s 100 words for 100 days writing project and how it’s inspired me to change the way that I think about writing on our blog and posting to our portfolio. We talk about the importance of writing for yourself as well as for others and why writing on your own website is important. With it being the twentieth anniversary of Jeffrey’s own site, we also talk about whether it’s important to archive older designs for posterity.

This week is a special Mad Men episode of Unfinished Business and I’m joined live from New York by Jen Simmons–the incredible host of The Web Ahead podcast–and our very special guest, the actor and comedian who plays Lou Avery on TV’s Mad Men, Allan Havey.

I imagine if I told people in advance that I was talking to director of UX at MailChimp Aarron Walter and Founder of User Interface Engineering Jared Spool on Unfinished Business this week, they’d imagine we’d talk about user experience design and possibly education. Instead, they and I talk about action figures and Action Man and whether fighting Nazis is cooler than fighting aliens. It’s not all Smurfs and Stretch Armstrong though, because we also discuss the art of public speaking, how to prepare for a talk and tips for a successful presentation, whether you’re speaking at a conference or pitching an idea to a manager or a concept to a client.

Fresh from our adventures at Smashing Conference in Santa Monica, on this week’s Unfinished Business I’m joined by user-experience professional, author (of some CSS book or another) and director at ClearLeft, Andy Budd. Joining us was one of my favourite people; designer, author and founder of Authentic Jobs, Cameron Moll.

On this week’s Unfinished Business, I’m joined by designers’ designer Dan Edwards and, one of my favourite people, designer Veerle Pieters.

I‘ve been looking forward to publishing this episode of Unfinished Business for over a month and I looked forward to recording it for even longer, because I got to talk about art direction and creativity on the web with two of the creative people that I respect most, Dan Mall and Jeffrey Zeldman.

The best podcasts listen to interesting people having interesting conversations about work, and life and for episode 104 of Unfinished Business I’m joined by two fascinating folk. Trent Walton and Stephen Hay.

Back for episode 103 of Unfinished Business is my favourite comedy duo, ‘Pipe and Pyjamas,’ Paul Boag and Jon Hicks.

A little later than advertised (and by “a little” I actually mean a week) I’m joined on Unfinished Business. Episode 102 by Rachel Andrew and Zoe Mickley Gillenwater.

We’re back. Back in business. Unfinished Business. Episode 101. For this, the first episode of 2015, I’m joined by two of the best well-known writers about how to implement CSS on a large scale Harry Roberts and Jonathan Snook.

This week is the one-hundredth episode of Unfinished Business and who better to join me than the person who helped me start it all, almost two years ago, Anna Debenham. We celebrate by talking about what went right and wrong in 2014 and our resolutions for 2015. Then we talk about meetings and how we can improve them.

On the penultimate episode of Unfinished Business of 2014, I’m joined by my design hero Trent Walton to talk about if an integrated responsive design and development workflow makes working out what and how to charge more difficult. We discuss Paravel, the three person studio that he helps run, how their business works, how they charge and if they negotiate on price. Of course, this being Unfinished Business, I couldn’t help talking about burgers and this week’s stupid cheeseburger stuffed crust pizza.