We’re delighted to have made the top three in the Design Agency Of The Year category of this year’s .Net Magazine Awards. The longlist of twenty was reduced after a huge public vote. It’s now in the hands of the judging panel, and the winner will be announced on 8th December.

Founded in 1998, A List Apart is the definitive online magazine “for people who make websites”. Issue 289 is a special dedicated to the redesign of the agency/portfolio site, and features Colly’s in-depth overview of our own redesign process.

We’re delighted to announce that long-time Erskinite Jamie Pittock recently took a Director’s role with Erskine. Jamie is now officially our Operations Director, responsible for ensuring we deliver work on time and on budget, alongside his existing all-round design, development and project management skills.

We’re delighted to be involved with two new events. Firstly, in September we’ll be speaking and running a workshop for the Leeds leg of the Future Of Web Design Tour. Secondly, in October we’re speaking, workshopping and even sponsoring the first ExpressionEngine & CodeIgniter Conference in the Netherlands.

Erskine Labs is our new blog, which we’ve finally launched after a good two and half years of business - about time! Expect to find industry opinions, design writeups, code snippets and some frighteningly weird outbursts of madness. Visit the site and more importantly, grab the RSS feed.

Yep, its not just our clients. As I write, Erskine co-founder Simon Campbell is with his Triton Oceanic gang diving undiscovered cave systems below the remote island of St Kilda, and our One More Hero men Greg and Glen have just started their epic 400-mile cycle ride to Paris. Good luck chaps!

If you’ve a train journey ahead, and access to a WH Smiths, we recommend you pick up the May 2009 issue of .net magazine, which features a two-page Erskine Design profile and interview with Campbell, Pittock and myself. Lovely.

Erskine Socials is an umbrella for a variety of meet-ups; a series of occasional discussions, talks and events for web designers, developers and beer drinkers from Nottingham and beyond. If you’re interested, head over to Erskine Socials and sign up for our forthcoming email updates.

The National Employer Service (NES) offers specialist advice on workforce development to the UK’s largest employers, supported by a direct funding contract with the Learning Skills Council (LSC). This enables employers to develop large scale, sustainable training programmes giving their people better skills and improving business performance.

NES work with over 60 top companies, mainly in the private sector, including Sainsbury’s, Vodafone, Tesco, Royal Mail, Rentokil Initial, Ford, McDonald’s and BAE Systems.

Iain Harper, NES Marketing & Communications Manager, came to Erskine with the ambitious objective of creating “a state of the art, independent website for NES that places the needs of the employers we work with at the heart of the user experience”.

“I can’t tell you how happy we all are with the look of the site. You have really surpassed yourself and I think you’ve pulled off that rarest of things – a government website that is simple, functional and beautiful.”
Iain Harper, NES Marketing & Communications Manager

http://nationalemployerservice.org.uk/

Colly will be presenting Knowing Your Audience on the Leeds leg of the freshly-announced Future Of Web Apps Tour, landing in Yorkshire on 28th May 2009. He’ll also be presenting The Process Toolbox at the @Media conference in London on 25th June. (Photo from Rachel Andrew)