1. Tweet Your Wisdom

    I guess you could call this a marketing exercise, but it certainly didn’t feel like one. In January of this year we screen-printed 120 posters featuring wise Tweets we’d collected through our Tweet Your Wisdom website. These posters were given to attendees of the New Adventures in Web Design conference, which took place in Nottingham in January.

    One of our Tweet Your Wisdom posters

    Over 200 Twitter users tweeted their apparent wisdom, and through an internal, anonymous voting process, we selected the following six Tweets to print, all of which subscribed to the ethos of the project.

    “It will all be okay in the end. If its not okay, its not the end.”
    –@robeam

    “Sometimes the best plan is not to have one.”
    –@mattberridge

    “Never wrestle a client. You both get dirty and the client likes it.”
    –@replete

    “The person who never made a mistake never made anything.”
    –@andyharris

    “Do something you’ve never done before.”
    –@gregwood

    “I went to naconf and all I got was this awesome poster.”
    –@greenboyroy

    These Tweets were then set in Akzidenz-Grotesk, and handed over to Norm & Alex at Waste Studio down the road from us. They did a great job of helping us select appropriate inks and paper stock, not to mention actually printing the posters for us. They’re a talented graphic design team as well, so do check them out. Thanks guys!

    The end result was 120 prints that felt, smelt and most importantly looked great. I really hope they’re all in nice frames above desks somewhere, so if you’re having a bad day you can look up and be comforted, motivated or maybe just amused.

    Type & texture detail.

    Sometimes the best plan is not to have one.

    It will all be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.

    I went to @naconf and all I got was this awesome poster

  2. Links for week ending 16th January

    Here’s the first of our weekly list of links. This may not happen every week, but we’ll collect together everything the team found interesting during a given 7 day period in order to share it all. Hopefully you’ll discover something you find interesting!

    Design/UI

    Front-end development

    Development/version control

    Browsers/devices

    Misc

  3. Introducing the new Erskine Labs

    At last, we have a proper blog! Since Erskine’s inception over four years ago, we’ve always wanted an appropriate way to share the collective genius of the team, and now we believe we’ve found it. A tumble of articles, photos, videos, audio snippets, notes and quotes; to be casually curated so that your feed readers don’t get swamped.

    If everything goes according to plan, the content we publish will be a pleasant mixture of Erskine knowledge and Erskine culture; a lovely balance between creativity and technics that only a team like ours can offer.

    For starters, check out the two new articles from Phil and Matt:

    So subscribe yourself to our RSS feed and enjoy as Simon, Jamie, the two Phils, Wil, James, Matt and myself do our best to provide the finest content we can rustle up. Also, be a good samaritan and let us know if you find any bugs or oddities.

  5. The Erskine redesign: Design development

    The previous part of this little series saw us fighting through some motivation/direction problems, and the realisation that even non-client projects need managing and scoping properly, right from the word go. We also found our 'fuck yeah’ design direction (as I call it); a visual approach that would give us a decent platform from which to design the actual website pages effectively.