Support Web Standards: Shop News

New Promo Video

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 11:28:00

We're really excited to release our new Promo Video. A quick 46 seconds showcasing our products. If a picture says a thousand words, how many does a video say? A short background to the video can be found on this blog post...

Check out the video below:

Last order dates for Christmas shipping

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 16:09:00

As we're approaching Christmas, please be aware of the last order dates if you wish to receive your products before Christmas. See below for the dates.

We won't ship any orders placed a week after last order dates, until January 3rd 2012, at the earliest. This is to avoid the surge of Christmas mail and potential delays and/or loss.

Last Order Dates for 2011:

Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland: 18th December

Great Britain: 17th December

Europe: 17th December

USA: 5th December

Rest of the World: 5th December

If you place your orders before the end of these dates, there's a great chance of getting them before Christmas, but we can not guarantee it. Sorry.

New products, new site!

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:53:00

Just in time for Blue Beanie Day 2011, we've just launched some new products to help you show your love and support for web standards.

A few pertinent points-

New Products

Last year the vinyl stickers proved very popular, so we produced two separate sets this year (Sticker Pack 1 and Sticker Pack 2). Each set features five vinyl stickers plus a free bonus HTML5 sticker which uses the W3C's official HTML5 logo.

We also produced a new set of one inch buttons (or badges, if you like) to pin to your lapel, wooly jumper, bag or whatever you like. Each button pack has a free vinyl sticker included as well.

Our brand-new new product is a set of sketchbooks, one blank, one with a dotted grid, in fetching blue and orange covers. More details can be found on their product pages.

New site

New products on the old site would have been boring, so we redid the site completely. The shop is now fully integrated (even though it still uses PayPal for accepting payments). It was planned to be fully responsive with a mobile-first approach, but time was against us, so we have shelved the mobile site and the responsive refinements for tomorrow and Friday. We did our best to get this site 100% done, but there are still little loose ends that we'll tie up over the next couple of days. If you spot anything, let us know.

Shipping

We think we've got a better grip on shipping rates, everything is sent out using standard post. One thing though, the last shipping days to be guaranteed (or so the Post Office says) to get your stuff before Christmas is 6th December (worldwide, Ireland, UK and Europe have until about the 16th December) so if you order before the 5th, we'll have it shipped by the 6th.

Special Thanks

Thanks to Blacknight for graciously providing the hosting, they're good people and provide an excellent service, do check them out for all your hosting needs.

Support Web Standards Shop is temporarily closed!

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 20:42:00

We have closed our shop for a few weeks while we restock our shelves- We'll be back in the New Year with some new products to help you show your support for Web Standards.

To be kept informed of the latest news, you can subscribe to our RSS Feed or follow us on Twitter @usewebstandards.

Creating Stickers

Sat, 01 May 2010 17:10:00

As our shop has sold out of vinyl stickers, I've decided to do a quick write up on the process of creating them.

Our stickers were printed on a eco solvent-based inkjet printer. Previously if you wanted vinyl stickers, you had to get them screen printed, which is a costly process- each colour had to have a separate screen and the production length had to be long enough to justify initial costs. Then to get a custom shaped label, you had to get a die created to stamp out the shape of the sticker (like a cookie cutter).

We are a really small operation and we could have gone the screen printing route for our stickers but we'd have to order and sell a heap of stickers to try make back the cost, and we'd only be able to get two or three stickers printed, which is no good, we wanted a nice little pack of stickers.

Using the eco solvent-based printing process allows us to produce small batches of stickers, using full CMYK colours and, as a special bonus, we can run the labels through a plotting machine that cuts the stickers to their finished shape with the minimum of cost and hassle- nice!

I was allowed free reign when it came to designing the stickers. At first I stuck to the imagery associated with the website, buttons and posters, but slowly expanded the colours and typography used in the stickers. In the end I had to choose five for production, so I chose the five I thought gelled together best. As part of my 'prototyping' (I annoyed the printers until they did some sample stickers for me) I was sticking the stickers on different stuff, like my desk unit and my iBook, to see how they worked. It was only when I saw Jeffrey Zeldman's avatar on my laptop, did I know that I needed to add a speech bubble sticker to the sticker packs (otherwise I'd have to deface my computer with a Sharpie).

It has to be noted that some extreme self control has to be used when dealing with custom shaped stickers- you can basically get any vector shape cut and sometimes more complicated shapes make it difficult to use the stickers, for example, stickers with small bits sticking out often get folded under the main sticker when applying.

If you have bought some stickers before they sold out, the best way to apply them is to use a piece of card stock (or a small squeegee if you have one) to smooth out the sticker, working from one end to the other. Vinyl stickers work best on a super smooth surface, like glass or plastic.

More photos available on Flickr.

- John Rainsford

Orders from April 14th

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:39:00

All orders placed on and after April 14th will not be shipped until April 30th at the earliest. Apologies for any inconvenience!

All orders have been shipped!

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:38:00

We know it's been a while, but we've finally got all orders shipped.

In planning the order fulfilment, the amount of time needed to pack products was overlooked. We took delivery of our stickers last week and then had to pack them and the buttons into bags.

The Irish postal system doesn't allow you to easily print shipping labels from their website, so after we packed everything up we had to make several trips to the Post Office to post everything, as we have shipped to all corners of the globe. It was hard work, but I hope it'll be worth it when people start receiving our products.

There is still some products left if you'd like to order some, but please note that products won't be shipped until the end of April.

Update: More photos on Flickr

Poster Process

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 17:03:00

I usually write my screen-printing process reports over on my personal blog, but I thought it might be of interest to the visitors of supportwebstandards.com.

My original idea for Support Web Standards posters was to take a grassroots approach i.e. I was going to print them myself, by hand, rather than sending them off to be printed and then distribute them myself amongst the community of web standards-fans. I felt (and still feel) that supporting web standards has to be done by everyone, from freelancer to the largest agencies, it's the only way significant progress can be made in the industry.

The choice of using screen-printing rather than lithography, digital or the elegant letterpress, was made for two reasons; I could print them myself from my really small home studio, keeping costs low and also with the final use of the poster in mind- this poster was created to be hung on walls, in cubicles, on telephone poles. I wanted a printing process that wouldn't fade easily.

Screen-printing is traditionally used for printing election posters and outdoor signage like billboards because it allows for a heavy layer of ink to be transferred onto the substrate. I used a fairly open mesh-count to print these posters, giving the poster a long-term vibrancy as well as a textured feel.
It is a three colour print, I first laid down some cyan (which is a deeper blue than traditional litho cyan), then I printed the lighter blue shade used for the beanie and finished the print with the halftoned face of Mr. Zeldman.

The edition length is 110 prints as well as miscellaneous artist and printer's proofs. It was a gruelling print run, due to the large solid colours. An interesting side effect was the slightest warping of the paper I used, probably due to the heaviness of ink printed on it.

I will try cover the process of producing the vinyl stickers, next.

-John Rainsford

More photos on Flickr.

Website Launch

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 20:36:00

We've put the finishing touches to our new website and shop, and now with its launch, we'd like to introduce ourselves, our site and our products.

My name is John Rainsford and I run a small web design business in Kildare, Ireland. In my spare time I screenprint artwork, that I design and create, for exhibitions and sales of work. Last year, I thought I'd intersect the two main processes of my life, standards-based web design and screenprinting, to help celebrate Blue Beanie Day 2009. After contemplating a few ideas, the one that stuck was an homage to the man who inspired Blue Beanie Day and the Web Standards movement, Mr. Jeffrey Zeldman.

Jeffrey Zeldman needs no introduction, his work and dedication to the web industry has shaped it to what it is today. The conventions on the web, that we take for granted today, were championed by Zeldman through a time when websites had to be coded in several ways to obtain consistency across browsers and platforms, when the information you were trying to communicate was lost within a sea of browser-specific hacks and non-semantic markup. It seems only right to have Zeldman as the poster-child for the continued support, improvement and celebration of web standards.

I couldn't just make posters with someone's face on it without asking (that'd be just rude), so when I contacted him, he was infectiously enthusiastic and wanted to get involved. Months later and several product additions, our shop is open for business.

Our sponsor is Blacknight Solutions, who have very kindly supplied us with hosting. I could not recommend Blacknight highly enough- they're a brilliant hosting company, with great staff and great hosting.

We've added a list of resources for Web Standards, for good measure, if we're missing any, please contact us!