My next project will be in HTML

Nathan Ford, Welsh-living and “Texas-born designer/developer/capitalist”, writes wise words about typography, and has created a couple of dev tools to strip out decoration from a site and tell you which web fonts you are actually seeing.

He tweets well too, useful stuff, not gibberish:

“With internal projects, including @gridsetapp, I’ve built the thing first, then styled. Results in more elegant CSS and slicker process.”

And this has prompted me to create my next project in HTML. Yes, you heard that correctly, I will start the process by writing plain HTML, with no styling whatsoever, to make sure that the thing works.

My next project is a recipe website, as the world doesn’t have enough recipe websites. This one, of course, will be different, it will have a seasonal twist. But what are recipe websites if not lots and lots of lists? A list of recipes, an unordered list of ingredients, a numbered list of instructions… the lists go on.

Coincidentally, this HTML First approach works hand in glove with Luke Wroblewski’s exhortations to design for Mobile First (buy the book, read the book, tell everyone). And mobile devices are ideal for reading recipes from in the kitchen.

Don’t get me wrong, I love choosing fonts, assiduously selecting colours and poring over grid systems. But that is the next chapter, not the first.