greg-wood.co.uk
The homepage of web designer Gregory James Wood
Blog!!
-
A Nice Little CSS Positioning Technique
Our Phil (finish your site mate!) asked me to pop this up here, it’s a neat little CSS positioning technique I use all the time. It’s not particularly difficult, nor is it massively new and revolutionary, but I see a lot of people achieving similar results in spectacularly longwinded ways.
Continue reading -
Seacliffe Borough Council
This article originally appeared in issue 178 of .net magazine, but I’m republishing it here because I’d like to use the Seacliffe site for a series of articles about CMSes and creativity. Or something like that. Any ideas?
Continue reading -
Flog the alive horse instead
We get told to “innovate” a lot in the web industry. New ideas, practices and technologies are thrown at us on a daily basis, each post in your feed reader as innovative as the next. In terms of design we’re looking everywhere but at a screen for inspiration, using all sorts of CSS trickery to enhance our pages for a lucky half dozen, and using the latest trendy real-world texture to make our sites stand out. But if everyone’s doing the next innovative thing, how original can we really be?
Continue reading -
Negative hovers piss me off
You heard. Web links that behave negatively when you hover over them piss me off. I don’t know why, and I know it’s not a massively significant issue, but it seems like a lot of people (including myself in the past) regularly fail to grasp the point of a hover/focus state.
Continue reading -
“The Red Album”: Initial Thoughts
I’ve only been a Weezer fan for a few years, and to be honest if you told me a few years ago that I’d be into them now I’d have probably laughed at you. After all, Hash Pipe was the song everyone recognised them by at the time. But I’ve since developed a special place in my ears for their simple, catchy, poppy and sometimes beautiful songs.
Continue reading -
Erskine Design at FOWD
Once upon a time, or more specifically during the afternoon of Wednesday 16th April, members of the team that is Erskine Design started to head into the city that is London. These hairy, broad-foreheaded ogres from the north were descending upon this nation’s capital for an event of medium proportions. This is their story.
Continue reading -
Being overly anal with HTML enduces rage
In the strange lands of HTML, semantics purism has been a fairly hot topic of late. With the help of some slightly more advanced CSS2 selectors, web developers have been able to start cutting out those unnecessary divisions and nasty classes, but are they just making more work for themselves?
Continue reading -
Ben Saunders and his North Pole Speed Record
Ben Saunders is a polar explorer, an athlete and a legend. At Erskine Design we got the pleasure of working with Ben on a website for his latest expedition; a solo speed record to the North Pole. Seeing as I had a significant role in the project, I thought I’d talk about some of the directions and decisions that were made during it’s development.
Continue reading -
A little more about the redesign
Designing a website for yourself is a hard thing to do. When I started designing this site I had a hundred different ideas that I wanted to implement. I wanted to reference this era of design, a bit of that one, and maybe use these photos and this typeface, etc. Seeing as I’ve reached a design that I’m pretty happy with, I thought I’d talk a bit about two of the main directions I took.
Continue reading -
Review: Okkervil River - Live in Nottingham
Soaring melodies, heart-wrenching lyrics, beautifully orchestrated music, Okkervil River are easily one of my favourite bands, and finally I got to see them live at the intimate Social club in Nottingham.
Continue reading -
Some Thoughts on Vertical Rhythm
There’s been a fair amount of discussion regarding the subject of vertical rhythm recently, and I’ve found myself reading a number of blog posts and visiting websites publicizing their use of vertical rhythm techniques. For the first time in while (especially so considering the amount of respect I have for such designers using the techniques) I’ve found myself looking upon the subject with the air of a sceptic.
Continue reading -
Why Even a Web Designer Needs Paper
Recently I completed some design mockups of an online gaming magazine (to start development soon) and if I must say so myself, I’m pretty proud of them. This article shows how useful pens and paper were during the initial stages of the design process.
Continue reading -
Usability is common sense
In the same way many web designers urge others to take inspiration from everything, not just other websites, I think the same can be said for usability and user experience. Recently returning from a ten week travelling trip, I’ve been using a lot of real world services, each presented differently in different countries. Sometimes, using these services was a lot more difficult than it should have been, and I gained some insight into the importance of usability.
Continue reading -
Does web design appeal more to the scientist or the artist?
I’m not talking about actual scientists or artists here. I’m talking about the scientist and the artist within ourselves. This, in principal, sounds fucking stupid and airy-fairy, but then again I do enjoy talking shite…
Continue reading -
A little about constraints
As someone with a super keen interest in websites, I often browse whilst thinking in the back of my mind, “how and why was this particular site designed?”. One thing that has been niggling me over the last few weeks is the visual wrapper. You know the one. It’s basically a column, usually about 780 pixels wide, often horizontally centred, that houses the content. Often it has a white background and maybe a slight shadow on either side. My question is this: why as web designers do we so often constrain ourselves with a fixed pixel visual space in which to work?
Continue reading -
My First Realign
It’s been a while in the making, mostly due to lack of free time to work on it, but finally my site is live again. It’s a relief to be honest, I’m sure many of you who make websites get that slow down (sometimes disguised as can’t-be-arsed) feeling coming towards the end of a project, something that played a large part in the development of this site.
Continue reading
RSS Feeds 
Recent Entries
Erskine Comrades
Copyright © Greg Wood mail@greg-wood.co.uk http://www.greg-wood.co.uk 2008 | Everything here protected and licensed using a Creative commons license | Get some RSS