Richard Saunders | Stream: Articles and photos

A friendship maker

This one is so good at making friends. They played so well together even though it was the first time they’d met.

Sibling love

Newport’s Steel Wave' by Peter Fink

It reflects Newport’s history of steel manufacturing and the foundation of the town on the banks of the rivers Usk. Erected in 1990, the sculpture was made using 50 tons of sheet steel and stands 14 metres high

Morning cuddles with a chicken

Meet Mabel

Light Sussex

Exploring at coed-y-felin woods

Walks in the woods

Climbing trees and scooting

Fast asleep

Our new arrival

Our new arrival born at 20:57 weighing 8lb 15oz. No name yet but mother and baby doing really well.

Woodland wanderings

Stomping on the beach

It may have been cold but it’s always good to get out in the fresh air.

M enjoying soft play

E painting

Weeknotes #10

Started the week getting a temporary MacBook up and running, having had to send mine into Apple to have the battery replaced. Whilst I have a laptop script to ease some of the pain, its amazing how many little tweaks you make to your OS experience to suit your needs. The design and UI team gathered to discuss the current redesign process. Allowing us to think through how we implement the new…

Returning home from time in the woods

Weeknotes #9

Another week of getting back into a normal routine. Releasing Contensis 12, defining new application behaviour and documenting a design system. The week started with our review, retrospective and planning. Si provided a really good overview of all the changes that have taken place in our search. From where we were to what will ship as part of Contensis 12. A summary can be seen on Contensis blog .…

Daffodils in January

It’s amazing to think it’s the middle of January and we’re seeing these daffodils in bloom on such a cold day.

Weeknotes #8

Weeknotes #8 As I expected I fell off the bandwagon of writing my weeknotes. I’m thinking I need to take a simpler approach similar to Mark Boulton and bullet point the key takeaways from the week. It was my first week back at Zengenti, not including those first few days of the new year. I was looking forward to getting my head into a familiar routine. Had a great week at Bluestone last week…

Caldey Island reflections

Winter fun on the beach

Look at that owl

Love the creativity in these owls at Winter lights in Bluestone.

Illuminated by flowers

Neon flowers illuminated the path at this years Winter Lights at Bluestone

2019 in review

It’s the first time I’ve taken the time to write one of these reviews, so we’ll see how it pans out. 2019 has had some highs and lows and a lot of soul searching. Work Like most people, the majority of the year was taken up by work. I’m fortunate enough to enjoy what I do, and I get to wear a number of hats at Zengenti which I’m extremely grateful for. Site View This year was dominated by Site…

A little wander in the woods

Good to stretch the legs after Sunday lunch.

An interesting raspberry beer

This was an unusual one this evening. Certainly not something I’d normally drink or likely to have again!

Christmas Eve beer wind down

Pia, Trzech Kumpli - Browar Lotny, NZ Session IPA

The night before Christmas Eve chicken pox enters the household

Wreath of 2019

Fun with Nan in the woods

The dark grey cloud

It’s 00:17, and I’ve woken from a five and a half our sleep. I was irritable yesterday afternoon and to save anyone any bother I took myself off to bed early. It had been a lovely day; whilst cold and a little wet, M and I had gone for a walk with the dog in to the nature reserve. We’d wrapped up warm, and I popped her in the back carrier and made our way through the slippery fields. Our collie…

Post short notes to a Jekyll blog using an iOS Shortcut

As I take steps to host all my content to my site first, I wanted to start adding notes and eventually push these to Twitter. The Indieweb defines a note as: A note is a post that is typically short unstructured plain text, written & posted quickly, that has its own permalink page. Creating, publishing, and owning your own notes is a key step towards reducing dependence on Twitter. I recently…

Christmas vibes at Bean and Bread

Esra at Bean and Bread Abergavenny

Create a photo post to Jekyll blog using the GitHub API and Apple Shortcuts

I’ve recently added a photos section to my site, and in keeping with the indie web movement I wanted to post photos to my site first and look to POSSE later. I’ve been keen to try out the Shortcuts app on my phone and seemed an ideal way to give it a go. I’ve seem a few similar approaches on uploading content to GitHub, and they all relied on the Working Copy app to do so. This shortcut submits…

The lack of default Tab focus in Firefox and Safari

I’ve struggled to understand why I couldn’t use the Tab key to navigate a web site in Firefox on my Mac. I’ve been using Firefox for about six months, but I’ve never taken the time to understand why. As a long time Chrome user I hadn’t had experienced this problem as Tab focus simply worked. But as I’ve been testing our components for accessibility I needed to find out why this was happening. It…

Paddington Station

Capturing crisp consistent screenshots for presentations

I prepare slide decks in Keynote a couple of times a year. You can guarantee that there will be a handful of screenshots of a website, code editor or some sort of application amongst the deck. I have an incessant need for consistency when it comes to preparing a deck and I want to ensure that the screenshots I produce are as crisp as possible. After all most projectors suck, so its worthwhile…

These two ‘Sit on logs’

Autumn days

Autumn days when the grass is jewelled And the silk inside a chestnut shell. Jetplanes meeting in the air to be refuelled. All these thing I love so well So I mustn’t forget No, I mustn’t forget. To say a great big Thank You I mustn’t forget

Accessibility testing tools

I recently came across a question in the Design Systems Slack community from Sonali Zaveri relating to accessibility testing tools. What tools does everyone use to test accessibility? I’m hoping to put together a testing playbook for my team. I want to detail out what tools to use and how, and what manual testing to perform (ie. Run Chrome Lighthouse, Check tab order, Increase your font size,…

Weeknotes #7

This week and the previous weekend was a departure from a normal week for me. I spent the weekend in Palma, Majorca with the team from Zengenti. We arrived in Palma on Saturday afternoon to a sweet 28℃, I’ve been craving the sunshine for a little while and it felt good. Our flight was delayed due to a wheel that needed to be replaced, however that gave me time to consume a few episodes of The New…

Bacon butties

Morning reflections

Reflections of Palma Mariner

Taking in the view

Dan enjoying the vintage train ride to Sóller from Palma.

Weeknotes #6

User flows and prototypes Work continued with prototyping the image flows this week. Its been great seeing the team come together around design. We each seem to be focusing on our roles, and I’m finding it easier to let go of trying to do everything. Accessibility - keyboard behaviour As a team we’re trying to focus on doing everything we can on being accessible. I noticed a list component that…

Weeknotes #5

I dont feel this week started off particularly well. It started with our review and retrospective, and it felt hard work to get through. Recent sprints have lacked focus, and have focussed more on the development of future releases and architecture. There is a genuine feeling of lets get the current release out of the door. People in the room including myself seemed to lack focus. The…

Weeknotes #4

I’m writing this weeks weeknotes late which if I’m honest is something I’d like to prevent in the future. Its one of the reasons I’ve struggled to blog before, by setting schedules that I can’t always achieve. Life can be busy, especially with a family with two young girls. But here are the highlights of the week that I’ve managed to gather from my daily notes. Design principles workshop As the…

Weeknotes #3

Monday kicked off with review and retrospective, Pang our intern shared some work she’d been doing implementing a new validation panel. This panel will be used in conjunction with tabs in the entry editor to summarise any problems with an entry prior to publishing. Whilst not complete, it did highlight some inconsistencies in our UI validation that have now been resolved. Dan demonstrated the new…