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Profile: Stuff and Nonsense

by Sali Earls

Based in Flintshire, North Wales, Stuff and Nonsense develop websites, ecommerce stores and web applications for a range of clients. Founded in 1998 and led by designer and author Andy Clarke, the small but respected organisation create visually engaging products that make the best use of technology, and have accessibility at their core.

The company use web standards technologies including XHTML and CSS, and in 2006 Clarke wrote "Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design", a book described by some reviewers as "definitive" and "inspirational".

Sali Earls found out more about the company.

What's the history of your company?
Stuff and Nonsense has been developing web sites for clients from our small studio in North Wales since 1998. We may be small, but since then we've gained a big reputation and are now well-known nationally and internationally for creating strong designs and highly accessible websites.

Our clients now include local North Wales businesses, national and international businesses, charities, academic institutions and government bodies. In the last few years, founder and lead designer Andy Clarke has designed for British Heart Foundation, Disney Store UK, Save The Children and WWF UK and we now work on a wide variety of design and development projects for organizations as close as Deeside and as far away as San Francisco.

What unique products/services does your company provide?
Stuff and Nonsense is first and foremost a creative web design studio and our focus is on creating inspiring experiences for the people who ultimately use our customers' sites. We begin by thinking about the goals of the end-user and the tasks that they want or need to accomplish on a site. We work with our customers to write and design their content and services into a structure that makes sense to the people using the site. Sometimes this involves art-directing photo shoots and other times writing copy that clearly communicates a site's purpose to both people and search engines such as Google. Most times it involves creating distinctive, easy to use designs that stick in peoples' minds.

We believe that a site becomes truly successful when people integrate it into their daily working or personal lives. Only a few years ago, peoples' use of sites such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter would have seemed unimaginable. Today, these sites and others like them have become integrated with many peoples' lifestyles. There are many lessons that businesses of all kinds can learn from these successes and Stuff and Nonsense uses creative design to make sites that people not only find easy to use, but love to use.

Stuff and Nonsense has been at the cutting-edge of creative, progressive web design and development for many years and we attribute much of our success to staying passionate about pushing the boundaries of what is possible and what is acceptable. We have become well-known for designing sites that are both highly creative and highly accessible both to people with disabilities and to new platforms including mobile devices such as Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch.

What's been the key to your success?
While we know that using the right technologies appropriately is important, what matters more is that people love to use a site and that they integrate it into their daily lives. Stuff and Nonsense was among the first creative companies in the UK to work with what have become known as Web Standards technologies. Using this set of web technologies, including CSS, appropriately has many advantages for our customers and their web site visitors and for Stuff and Nonsense as a business. Our success has largely come from staying at the forefront of creative, accessible design and from mixing our knowledge of visual design and user-experience with the use of these Web Standards technologies.

Rather than keep this knowledge to ourselves, we published articles about our work and how we use Web Standards technologies on blogs and in magazine articles for others to learn from. This gained Stuff and Nonsense an international reputation, the opportunity to speak to audiences at web conferences world-wide and it opened doors that might have otherwise stayed closed.

What one piece of outside technology has benefited your company most?
We believe that it is important to remember that technology of any kind is only a tool, a means to an end. However Stuff and Nonsense has become very well-known, both nationally and internationally, for our work with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). We even wrote a best- selling book on progressive design with CSS. 'Transcending CSS: The Fine Art Of Web Design' which has now sold over 20,000 English language copies world-wide and has been translated into eight international languages (but not Welsh).

Cascading Style Sheets enable the content of a web document to made separate from its visual structure and presentation. This means that web content to be more accessible, presented in more flexible ways and is portable to more devices. Never has this been more important as it is today. As devices such as Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch have shown us, in the future the content and services that our customers provide over the web must be as flexible as is possible and CSS lies at the heart of this.

Stuff and Nonsense's lead designer Andy Clarke is an Invited Expert to the W3C's CSS Working Group (the international body that develops new standards for the web) and the founder of CSS Eleven, an international group of high-profile designers who's aim is to help the development of new CSS standards in the future. We also promote creative, progressive web design and development using CSS at conference and workshop events world-wide (this year alone we have spoken to audiences in Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA) and through our writing in books and magazine articles.

Working with, writing about, teaching and developing CSS has taken Stuff and Nonsense from a business with a client-base limited to Wales to one that now designs for and consults for companies world- wide. Stuff and Nonsense has a lot to thank CSS for.

What one piece of advice would you give to start-up companies in your field?
Since Stuff and Nonsense began in 1998, we have tried to stay true to our main objective; to do nice work for nice people, work that we can be proud of. My advice for anyone starting out down this road is to remain passionate and committed to the reasons that made you want to design creatively for the web; to listen to your gut instincts about what makes you different from those people and companies that also operate in the industry and to your customers. Above all, stay enthusiastic about the web and eager to learn about, and adapt to the changes that are taking place on the web every day.

Where do you see your company going in the future?
Stuff and Nonsense has come a long way since 1998. We've had a lot of success and hardly a day in ten years without a job to do. We've also had our fair share of failures, but have learned from them that we want to stay small and focussed on what we know we do best. So now and in the future we will focus on our core strengths of creative, user-experience design and related technologies such as CSS. If the last ten years are anything to go by, it's going to fun, exciting and creatively challenging; just the things that we relish.

Find out more about Stuff and Nonsense at www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk.

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