Erskine Design Latest Posts

Mistaking the tool for the practice

2013-06-05T00:00:00+01:00

As a developer I’m always on the lookout for the best applications, the fastest machines and the latest, most colourful updates to a product line. But sometimes I find that this can be unhealthy, addictive behaviour and so slowly, over the years, I’ve tried to become more critical of the tools around me. There are two questions that I try to ask as often as possible.

Introducing Mat

2013-05-22T00:00:00+01:00

A warm welcome to another great addition to our growing front-end development team, Mat Hayward! Mat lives across the street from our Nottingham office, so naturally it was a good fit. He's also got a magnificent haircut and an eagle eye for quality. He'll fit right in.

Holy Erskinite!

2013-05-22T00:00:00+01:00

We're excited to announce that our fearless intern Robin Rendle has joined the team full-time as a front-end developer! No longer in charge of our coffee order, Robin will be focusing on pushing the limits in front-end technologies with the rest of the flock.

Welcome, Tom!

2013-05-22T00:00:00+01:00

We’re pleased to announce the latest addition to our development team and second Beestonian, Tom Davies! Tom has a first class degree in Experimental Psychology, specifically human factors and visual psychology. The dude knows his stuff. Welcome aboard!

YCN: Studio Insights

2013-04-19T00:00:00+01:00

Phil's been interviewed by the wonderful folks at YCN for their Intelligence column. He discusses what it's like behind the scenes at Erskine Design: working across different timezones, the team, our approach and process.

Read the full interview here.

Bookmarking

2013-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

Much has been said about the difficulties of reading a text on a screen yet little has been said of how a reader might want to change the text itself. Here we can see how a Parisian student ferociously marked his copy of Virgil sometime during the mid sixteenth century, highlighting and editing the text with comments. Images like this ask something of us; how should we mark and preserve our versions of a text today? And what about other sorts of markings, not just medieval, Parisian highlights and scribbles but changes of other kinds too?

Job opening for a Senior Designer

2013-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

We're looking for a full-time senior web designer to join the team in our Nottingham office. It's a great opportunity to work on some large-scale projects with a talented team for clients such as the BBC and Frieze.

Commoditising web design: is the price right?

2012-10-23T00:00:00+01:00

A couple of years ago on a busy Ryanair flight to Riga, I was seated next to an incongruously tweedy gent with a Terry Thomas demeanour. After a particularly heavy touchdown, he turned and asked "my god, did we land or were we shot down?" Clearly more familiar with traditional carriers, he seemed traumatised, which as frequent fliers will know is all part of the Ryanair experience.

Getting sprightly with SASS

2012-09-04T00:00:00+01:00

A lot of you might be thinking "the LESS I hear about CSS preprocessors, the better". But you could be missing out, while variables and nesting give us some sanity for frontend dev, things can get really fun with mixins.

Erskine USA

2012-06-28T00:00:00+01:00

We're excited to announce the opening of our new office in Houston, Texas! Our Operations Lead, Garrett Winder, is heading over to America to setup our first overseas office deep in the heart of Texas.

EE-legal in Leiden

2012-06-27T00:00:00+01:00

Garrett Winder, our Operations Lead, recently nipped over to Leiden in the Netherlands to speak at the EECI EU 2012 conference.

Designing the Derby City Council website architecture using the LGNL

2012-06-12T00:00:00+01:00

As part of our work with Derby City Council, we were asked to design a new information architecture for derby.gov.uk that their internal web team could then build upon. The council had identified Local Government Navigation List (LGNL) as a starting point for this new structure.

Making a SPLASH

2012-05-31T00:00:00+01:00

Our Director of Business & Strategy, Iain Harper, has just returned from a day out in Gloucester pretending to be Theo Paphitis. He tells us more?

Supporting Frieze Art Fair New York

2012-05-09T00:00:00+01:00

It's been a busy year for our oldest client Frieze that continued last week in New York, where they held their first landmark art fair outside Europe.

Calculating EMs with SCSS

2012-05-08T00:00:00+01:00

Earlier this year Erskine made the switch to SCSS and I've really loved what its done to our front-end workflow. One thing I'm particularly fond of is how SCSS has improved how we're calculating EMs.

Announcing erskinedesign.com v3

2012-04-16T00:00:00+01:00

This year marks Erskine's seventh birthday. It's also been three long years since we last refreshed the Erskine site and a lot has happened. Some of the faces have changed but our ethos remains the same: to build superlative websites with thoughtful design and ingenious technology.

Standards > Next

2012-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

Last Saturday we spoke at the excellent Standards > Next 'Mobile and Devices' conference in Manchester. Our brief was to deliver a frontline report from the coalface of the web industry about the ways in which responsive design is applied in a commercial agency environment.

Responsive design: stories from the coalface

2012-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

Lately, the web industry has been preoccupied with responsive design. Questions, approaches and opinions abound.

Surviving a social media storm

2012-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

Here at Erskine we?re finding that our clients are taking more active control of their social media channels and integrating them directly with their website strategy. In the space of two years, mainly due to convergence around Twitter and Facebook, social media has gone from being a reasonably niche activity to an essential marketing and customer service tool for almost all organisations. One of the reasons I?ve joined Erskine is to help clients understand and make the most of the potential these channels offer.

Introducing Gridpak

2012-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

This week we quietly launched Gridpak, a tool that we hope will dramatically speed up the process of creating with Responsive Web Design layouts.