A blog by the folks at Erskine Design
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.
I’m a big fan of Adobe Fireworks. It’s by no means perfect; but an arsenal of vector tools, bitmap editing capabilities, symbols (like Photoshop Smart Objects, but better) and layer filters make it a great piece of image manipulation software for the screen.
One of my favourite features (and one that I use all the time) is the ‘Convert to Alpha’ filter. This converts the colour of whatever is on that layer to the alpha equivalent; the lighter the colour, the more transparent it becomes. It’s a simple and very useful concept.
A couple of days ago James and I headed up north for the Manchester Design Symposium. The lineup was pretty diverse; including talks from John Walters (Eye Magazine), Bruno Maag (Dalton Maag) and Johnathan Barnbrook (Barnbrook). The best thing about the event for me, was listening to the sometimes opposing views of very different designers on the value of their craft. It also left me feeling a bit nostalgic about my days as a student.
Hopefully it’s the first of many similar events.
One of the things I enjoy is boiling things down: refining and reducing. I’m a minimalist. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that, as designer, I’m constantly trying to turn a sometimes overwhelming list of requirements and constraints into something simple and beautiful. I now find myself attempting to apply this streamlined approach to the rest of my life.
I’m going to take a look at how DOM scripting can be used to encrypt an email address using the principles of progressive enhancement.