Greg Wood

Greg Wood is a Web Designer at Erskine Design (the lucky sod! :-P). He’s quickly building a great reputation for breaking the mold on his personal site, a couple of my personal favourites being Top 5 reasons to learn to dive and Top 5 Spielberg films. On this weeks episode Greg takes me through how he works, his career to date and his plans for the future.

Greg Wood – The Highlights

So what’s your job title?

Well I guess despite the stigma for calling yourself a web designer I normally do because you try something else, like you try to call yourself designer for example when meeting someone new and they just end up saying “Oh what do you design then?” and you just say “Oh websites”, “So you’re a web designer”, “…yeah”, even though you try and get away from that in the first place it’s just easier to call yourself a web designer and live with the whole, my son design website or my nephew or something like that. It’s just easier and I design website, that’s what I do.

Do you focus on the visual side or the front-end as well?

Both generally, the front-end design and front-end implementation we call it, but basically HTML, CSS with a bit of javaScript.

You do “non-uniform” layouts in you design work, what made you start doing that?

I think initially I just became a bit bored with the whole, content here, secondary content here, things at the top, things at the bottom, job done and on my old blog I just started getting a bit bored of writing blog posts in that format and I just wanted to mix thing up a bit so I did a few posts that did that and when it came time to do another version of my blog I thought, I hated writing all those other bits and enjoyed the two or three that I’d designed specifically for each post so I just decided to focus on that. It’s a lot more enjoyable doing this version of my blog that the last one.

Do you get to incorporate any of that into your client work?

To some extent yeah, but it is difficult because there would be a massive cost implication for a start and to sell clients on that is not really going to wash with many clients and a lot of clients don’t have ever changing content like I do for example, I mean when they write things for their websites it’s normally quite targeted and to change the design for each post or news item isn’t very feasible, but we do at Erskine try to make our clients enjoy publishing their website and give them more flexibility with adding images, blockquotes, headings, things like that were they can use a heading but they can also use an alternative version of the heading for example and the same with images and blockquotes. So they have this options when they’re publishing a post.

So how do you implement that kind of flexibility?

Expression Engine is generally what we use and that’s so flexible that offering those options is pretty easy to be honest. So when the client has added the main content and they then go to add an image for example, they upload the image and there’s just a little drop-down for setting how they’d like to style this, float it right or left, add a caption. The templating system works in such a way that we can set those things really easily.

What’s you greatest achievement been so far?

Probably getting the job at Erskine because they took quite a big gamble on me because I was so inexperienced and I don’t think I would have grown the same amount as a designer, if I’d worked for another agency.

And where do you see yourself in the future?

Hmm… somewhere good but I don’t know where. I’d still like to be doing design stuff, whether it’s on the web or not you don’t know because you don’t know how the web is going to change in 5, 10, 15 years. I’d like to stay with Erskine so we can form an ultimate company just doing awesome design stuff all day and with very few clients. *laugh* So somehow creating products that we sell and people buy and working for ourselves all day. That would be super.

To ensure you never miss an episode you can:

• Subscribe to my RSS feed
• Subscribe to my iTunes feed
• Follow me on twitter

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.