About Strikeworks Studio

Who I am

I am Gilbert Anderson, and Strikeworks Studio is my one-person UX studio rather than a full agency, which means the person who talks to you about your project is the same person who researches it, designs it, and writes the code. I got here through coursework in user experience and front-end development, and I built this site itself as proof of that work rather than just describing it in a paragraph, since I think a portfolio should let you see the actual craftsmanship instead of taking my word for it.

My goal is fairly simple: to design and build small, fast, accessible websites for individuals, nonprofits, and small businesses that need a professional online presence but cannot afford, or do not need, a large agency retainer. Calling Strikeworks a UX studio rather than just a web design shop is deliberate, since every project starts with the same question a larger UX team would ask, namely who is actually going to use this and what are they trying to get done, before a single line of CSS gets written.

Who I build for

My clients tend to split into two overlapping groups, and I think it is worth being specific about both since they want different things from the same site. The first group is small-business and nonprofit owners who are usually browsing on a phone during off-hours and want to see proof of past work and a sense of pricing before they ever reach out. The second group is hiring managers and technical recruiters who review a site quickly on a laptop and care more about clean code and organized case studies than persuasive sales copy. Because of that split, I keep the plain-language summary up front on every project and let visitors drill into the technical detail, things like markup choices and accessibility notes, only if they actually choose to.

How I design

I try to hold every page to the same four design principles instead of just arranging things until they look right in the moment. Alignment means text and graphic elements line up on a consistent grid instead of floating around with no relationship to each other. Proximity means related items, like a case study's thumbnail, title, and summary, sit close enough together that a visitor reads them as one unit. Contrast means unrelated sections, like the navigation bar and the footer, look visually distinct enough that nobody confuses one for the other. And repetition means headings, spacing, and button styles stay consistent from page to page, which is really the visual half of keeping a whole site maintainable long after launch (Nielsen Norman Group, n.d.).

How I build

Every page on this site shares one external stylesheet, one header, and one footer, so a design change only has to happen in one file instead of across a dozen separate pages. I write semantic HTML5 first, meaning the structure of a page should make sense even with every style stripped away, and I layer CSS3 and a small amount of JavaScript on top of that rather than the other way around.

References

• Nielsen Norman Group. (n.d.). The four fundamental principles of visual design. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/gestalt-proximity/