Status Update on Jul 27
"Social media. Hate crimes. Love. None of it is rational." -- @margueritAbout Gridwork Design
We are a web design company in Tacoma, WA.
Hire us to design, redesign or develop your website. Informative and concise communication starts from the beginning with a brief project estimate, summarized and broken down to line-item costs, our terms clearly laid out for review.
We specialize in art direction, interface design, front-end code and ExpressionEngine development. Our clean, modern style of design works to enhance content instead of overpowering it. Every word, graphic and link is considered for how it improves the overall experience of visitors, regardless of the profile or scope of a particular project.
Currently booking new projects beginning in November 2010. Please contact us for details or just to chat.
Creative Process
Time to get everything on the table. Depending on your location and preferences, we will meet, talk, email, or instant message about your goals for a successful project. Then, we step away to contemplate, develop strategy, and generate outlines for moving forward. This might include competitive research, software evaluations, creating a content strategy, or simply asking more questions. These are tasks that we return to repeatedly for inspiration and clarity. Ultimately, the aim is to identify a few concrete goals that we can work towards and measure quantitative results against.
Properly composed design is often the most important, contentious phase of your project. Our focus is on four fundamental elements of design — typography, grids, interactivity and color. The process begins offline, sketching wireframes on graph paper for reference before booting up InDesign and assembling layouts for your review. Those initial designs will evolve through several rounds of intensive iterations, often including additional pages, before moving to development.
We write code from a designers perspective, striving for simplicity and minimalism. Each navigation element, submit button and line of CSS code is thoughtfully considered. Our strict use of web standards reduces the amount of required code, making your site adaptable to different circumstances down the road. Nearly all our projects are developed on the leading low-cost content management system ExpressionEngine, and we frequently come into existing EE installs to fix things or provide long-term maintenance.
After launching a new project, we don't just pack up and wish you good luck. Ideally, you'll keep us on contract to help fix bugs, provide training to new staff, and make ongoing improvements. Websites are living organisms, you need to feed them, be responsive to your audience, and nurture growth. We stay on top of trends in web marketing, social media and development tools so that when something truly useful comes along, you'll be able to leverage it with the best possible timing.
Who is behind Gridwork?
My name is Seamus Holman and I'm an independent web designer. The truth is that it's a bit of a stretch to be throwing around “we” and “us” as if there is a room full of people checking in from 9 to 5 everyday. When necessary, Gridwork creates or joins small teams of specialists to shorten turnaround times and take advantage of individual strengths, but lots of the time, it's just me.
A huge advantage of being self-employed means, for the most part, I work when I'm most productive, often alone and late into the night. Even though I'm frequently solo, collaboration and outside ideas are usually necessary to make something really wonderful. Some of the people and firms I'm proud to have worked with are listed to the right.
Besides doing Gridwork, I've been a data entry temp, textbook production drone, newspaper editor, art director and janitor. Outside of work, I am enthusiastic about cooking, tennis, shiny furniture, cats, web design (some things overlap) and small, efficient houses.