Helping Giving
My presence at LSA:DMC, which puts me in contact with designers, has given me great opportunities. For many of the designers the mockup is fun, but the implementation takes on a level of drag. Usually, because of deadlines or waning interest, they then employ my talents to get the last leg of the job done. My work then is to take their mockups and translate it into XHTML+CSS, sometimes also adding some very necessary components. In the case of "Giving Stories", a site for the University of Michigan's alumni association, this meant creating a lot of JavaScript transitions.
The site had originally been billed to the designer at ten hours, but it gradually burgeoned into a massive Flash site (potentially). This meant that he would have had to spend considerable amounts of time coding the site in Flash, which would definitely cut out on any profit and go over the ten hours allocated for the project. So he looked to me to quickly implement the site in a compliant HTML page, while keeping under a certain budget. To speed in development he cut up the images as necessary before sending them over to me. The initial part of development revolved around creating a compliant XHTML+CSS site that could effectively serve the provided stories, plus any future ones. The provided images were not adequate and so I had to redo some of the images from the provided Photoshop document.
After completing this portion, the much harder animations had to be implemented. Because of my familiarity with MooTools I opted for that script library. The site did not need AJAX, just fancy animations, and this was what MooTools was most proficient in. The work itself took a good deal of tweaking to achieve the exact layout and finish. Even after all the tweaking on a fade-in/fade-out and roll-down effect things were just not right. So I left it up to the designer to use his best judgement and translated all of the values to easily editable variables. This would let him or the client change it to suit their needs, even at the last minute.
The site was completed on schedule and even the time deadline was not an issue, working through an entire Saturday afternoon to finish it. The final version has yet to go up, but the accompanying images should provide a good representation of the final site (I always stick religiously to a designer's vision). Unfortunately, the immense work to enable all those fun transitions won't come across.
