CollyLogic | Simon Collison's Illogical Waffle

North Pole Speed Record

21st March 2008

A few days ago we launched the North Pole Speed Record site for our intrepid client Ben Saunders. Ben is a record-breaking long-distance skier, with three North Pole expeditions under his belt. He is the youngest to ski solo to the North Pole and holds the record for the longest solo Arctic journey by a Briton.

This latest expedition (supported by Ernst & Young) is an attempt to set a new world speed record from Ward Hunt Island to the Geographic North Pole. The current record was set in 2005 by a guided team using dog sleds and numerous re-supplies in a time of 36 days 22 hours. Ben’s expedition will be solo and unsupported and on foot. This route has only ever been completed once solo and unsupported, by Pen Hadow in 2003. Ben aims to halve his time and complete it in 30 days.

I love the Equipment page (below). Just check out the sheer volume of stuff ben has to drag behind him, including his trusty “spork”, and a gun to ward off polar bears. Gulp.

We worked closely with Ben, his team and the sponsors in a very short time frame to pull this website together and reflect the scope of the expedition and Ben’s personality. We also created bespoke tools to allow him to easily post journal entries from the North Pole on his mobile without exposing himself to frostbite or hammering his batteries.

We’re still waiting on clips from a couple of TV interviews and a few other bits, but to get some other perspective on Ben and his achievements, check out the press page.

Huge credit to our Greg Wood who led the design and development on this project. Greg has written more about his approach here. We’re now counting down the days until our client sends a blog post from the North Pole using the tools we built. That will be pretty special. Ben is off to the South Pole in November too, so hopefully we can collect the set. Next stop, the moon.

#739 | 21/03/08 | Erskine | More >

Pimping Greg Wood’s new website

28th February 2008

Erskine’s chief carrot-topped design wizard Greg Wood has just relaunched his personal website - www.greg-wood.co.uk - and I love it. Peppered with his own idiosyncratic robot doodles and “...a deliciously organized foray into the abnormalities and oddities of [his] grey matter.”

The devil is in the details, so I recommend trawling around this cornucopia of obsessiveness. For CSS trickery, check out the expansion of the screenshot when resizing text on the Work page, or the visual details on this Sweeney Todd review. I do worry about the contents of Greg’s brain, so enter his website with caution.

#736 | 28/02/08 | Erskine Web design | More >

Get your own Erskine badge and join our ephemera wall

18th February 2008

Earlier today I posted a photograph of our shiny new card-mounted Erskine Design badges on Flickr. Since then, I’ve had way too many emails, tweets and comments asking how to get hold of one.

OK. It would be our pleasure to send these little birdies out into the postal system and around the world at our own expense, just because you say “Want one” or “How do I get one?” without saying “please” (you know who you are). But we are not going to do that.

How to get a badge

If you want one, you have to send us something first. It is easy really. Send us a sticker, badge, mug or t-shirt (cheeky me) of your company or employer, or if that isn’t possible just send any old crap. Its the gesture we’re excited by, not monetary value. I’ll ready a load of badges and the moment I receive your ephemera, we’ll post ours out the same day.

What will we do with your crap?

Here at Erskine Design towers, we’ll build a wall of received ephemera and blog/Flickr it and get you linked up. Actually, we might also do some crazy image-map madness at a custom URL that all the cool people will be aching to be featured on. Maybe.

Send your rubbish to...

Erskine Design, 4 Stoney Street, Lace Market, Nottingham NG1 1LG, United Kingdom. Don’t forget to enclose your own address and a wee message.

Make your own bargain buttons

Huge credit to our friends at PureButtons Inc for the badges. With easy-to-use PSD templates and very affordable pricing, these folks are tops and get the Erskine Design seal of approval (and they have not asked me to blog this).

#735 | 18/02/08 | Erskine | More >

Dear students…

31st January 2008

On 12th March at 9am, I’ll be presenting the snappily-titled The Business of Web Design: Latest Trends in Web Design and Web-based Applications lecture at the University of Nottingham. This forms part of a great season of presentations for the Development of Digital Business module that also includes lectures from the likes of Microsoft, IBM and a plethora of others.

If you’re on that course, make sure you don’t get pissed the night before and oversleep in a pool of vomit and cigarette butts. I know what you students are like.

#730 | 31/01/08 | Erskine Web stuff | More >

Holding out for a PHP hero

22nd January 2008

Where have all the good PHP developers gone and where are all the gods? Where’s the great white Hercules to fight the rising odds? C’mon folks! Four days until our deadline, and we’ve had some great applicants for the Creative Developer post (feel free to keep ‘em coming) but hardly any for the PHP/MySQL Developer post. Maybe there’s a drought in the Nottingham and Leeds area? Anyway, there’s still time, so head over to our Erskine Jobs page.

#729 | 22/01/08 | Erskine | More >

Erskine are hiring again!

11th January 2008

Its all hands to the pumps here at Erskine Design, and yet again we are in search of two further team members to work in either our Nottingham or Leeds offices. We need a Creative Developer and also a PHP/MySQL Developer. If you can spot an opportunity that’s too good to miss, and think you can cut the mustard, then please jump forth to the Erskine Design jobs page. Deadline is 25th January.

#726 | 11/01/08 | Erskine | More >

Mr. Swinfield’s laboratory

12th November 2007

A quick bit of promotion for one of Erskine’s finest soldiers. Our man Glen Swinfield has redesigned, rebuilt and relaunched his personal website using a combination of ExpressionEngine, tea, biscuits, Kings Of Leon and found materials. He’s made the move away from Wordpress and the previously rather haphazard smorgasbord of visual oddments to reveal that even the most obsessive of back-enders can splash it about on the front end.

I recommend subscribing to Glen’s site if you have even the slightest interest in PHP, MySQL, Code Igniter, EE plugins/modules/extensions, or anything else concerned with matters of under-the-hood engineering. He’s yer man, and I am not fibbing when I tell you that he’s cooking up some tremendous bits and pieces to be released over the next few months, even though the cupboard is a bit bare right now. Get busy in your lab, Mr. Swinfield.

#716 | 12/11/07 | Erskine | More >

Frieze

3rd October 2007

For seven or eight months, we at Erskine Design have been slogging our guts out on two or three vast projects, perhaps the biggest being a major rebuild and redesign for frieze Magazine - Europe’s #1 art magazine.

For me this was a dream job, as I used to buy frieze every month back in my art days. The Frieze team are also responsible for the Frieze Art Fair (Europe’s #1 art event), and year-round commissioning through the Frieze Foundation. We have also produced brand new sites for these.

Specifically, this was a real challenge for our beloved ExpressionEngine, but as usual it passed with flying colours. In particular, using EE’s new Multiple Site Manager, we’re running all three sites from one control panel. This is combined with a bridging application to allow for paid membership subscriptions, interaction with Filemaker, a robust advert server, and a little load-balancing trickery.

I’m particularly excited to see how the link between paper and pixels will be strengthened. The latest issue of the magazine now includes details of extra web content on the mag’s contents page (above), and I really like this. For example, videos obviously cannot be viewed in the physical mag, but it is made clear that related content can be found on the website. The Frieze team understand how to use the web as extension (and not mirror) of the physical magazine, and I know this is something they are keen to exploit further as the site develops.

All in all, this job has been epic. Sixteen years of magazine archives, five years of art fair archives, and a client team of around forty people in three countries. A real treat was the opportunity to work with Paul Barnes, co-designer of the Guardian Egyptian typeface. All in all, there were too many workshops and design iterations to count, a hundred database problems, and oh so many late nights with little or no sleep. Still, we’re really proud of this one, and I have to say that personally, the challenge of translating physical magazine or newspaper content for online digestion is becoming a real dream gig. Murdoch, give us a call.

Note to scrutinizers: Yep, we still have a lot to do, both in terms of content and style. Therefore, I’d appreciate a bit of leeway regarding validation, stray tags and some decidedly non-semantic classes etc. Trust me, when a job like this gets rolling, these lesser details fall by the wayside as one’s health and family take precedence. We’ll get there…

#713 | 03/10/07 | Erskine | More >

Ampersands are the new ‘E’s

29th September 2007

Things are so, so busy at Erskine Design that I’ve had zero time to continue blogging of late, for which I apologise. New staff, new office, new projects, plus a major new site we just soft-launched (but more about that later, once I’ve ironed out a few things).

Anyway, until I get back into the spirit of blogging, I think I’ll flag up an ace little site that my colleague Jamie just built for Sara at Mair Education. I love the logo (yes, ampersands are the new “E"s) and the lickable pink (fnar fnar).

More to come, folks. Stick with me. It’ll get good again soon…

#711 | 29/09/07 | Erskine | More >

A warm welcome to Greg and Glen

22nd August 2007

Apologies for the weeds growing around my patch of late. I do have oodles of juicy stuff to impart soon, including a couple of exciting launches, and a potential redesign of this site (finally) - plus our Jamie is cooking up all sorts of dangerous things in his “lab”.

As things stand we still find our mucky fingers in some rather big pies, getting to know 4am rather too well, and continuing to burn the candle at both ends (which is a very dangerous thing to do, readers).

Anyway, some good news. We are thrilled to welcome the latest additions to the Erskine Design team.

We met some great people during the interviews and I genuinely wish we could have snaffled more of you, but in the end our shining lights turned out to be faraway Bournemouth’s Greg Wood, and Nottingham’s own (well, via Leicester) Glen Swinfield.

OK, they don’t actually start yet, and Greg’s gotta relocate and find a place to live, but hell, why not blog it? My way of making sure they can’t now wriggle out of the deal.

Welcome chaps - now we are numbering five within our first year. Wow! Oh, and for the record, it is a dash of milk with one sugar.

#709 | 22/08/07 | Erskine | More >