An Introduction to CSS3

Last month I gave this training presentation to the Interactive team at work. While many of the concepts discussed may be nothing new to some of you it was intended to get everyone, including back-end devs and designers, on the same page as to what our capabilities are.

The clients in my particular industry tend to still be very conservative so the discussion of how to handle older versions of Internet Explorer comes up routinely. I mainly ignore IE in this slide deck because, let’s face it, it just isn’t going to handle many of these CSS3 properties without additional workarounds. I touch upon that a little, but the subtext is to always strive for progressive enhancement and graceful degradation.

Hopefully others will find this useful in some capacity. If you do use it for training others, learn something new or have a suggestion I’d love to hear it, so please leave a comment.

An Introduction to CSS3

Ampersandrew.com Launches

While all the programming and development was done by me, all design and content of this site has been created Andrew Smith.

The best clients are also the toughest.

I’ve partnered with the talented Mr. Smith as a developer on a variety of projects in the past, many of which can be seen right here in my portfolio. The Flash version of his portfolio had been in development for months with another dev but bugs were preventing it from being completed without delay. Andrew reached out to me to create an HTML version that would retain the same look and feel and could keep the smooth transitions and animation of the Flash version.

This was a great opportunity to practice what I’ve preached for years about the benefits of HTML+CSS over Flash, as well as stretch my legs with the animation side of jQuery. As an added bonus, delivering a site that would work, as is, in an iPhone or iPad was fantastic for him, especially when we started this site at the height of the great Apple vs Google & Adobe conflict.

The portfolio includes:

  • Design & Content by Andrew Smith
  • Single Page Layout
  • HTML5 and CSS3
  • Progressive enhancement with Webkit CSS3 transitions
  • jQuery Galleries and Lightboxes, based on a heavily modified Colorbox
  • Custom HTML5 Video Player
  • Completely customized WordPress theme, dropping almost everything from the traditional front-end yet leveraging it as full featured CMS
  • Site of the Day – The CSS Awards

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El Cuarto Año High School Site Launches

This was the final project of a few students, with the initial idea being to take what was once just a printed literary magazine and put it online, but it grew into something that could be a larger web presence for the high school as a whole. Prior to this site El Cuarto Año had only a small paragraph under the Association House of Chicago website.

A few students were responsible for gathering and editing all of the content, while my faculty contact and all around great guy Mr. Zapata kept them on track. I set up the system and design, gave advice on hosting and domain selection, and will train them this fall so that they’ll be able to upload their own content without assistance.

Website includes:

  • All Design and Development
  • Customized WordPress Theme based on Modularity
  • Image Galleries and Music Players

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FugScreens Studios Launches

Zissou at FugScreens approached me to help with the launch of a new site for his studio, one that was separate from his own personal portfolio website. He had a few ideas about the look but wanted to stress simplicity. This is the design I came up using their logo for inspiration and incorporating his hand drawn graphic ink splatters.

The entire site was built on WordPress allowing him and interns the ability to update everything without much knowledge of code. The most important aspect was selecting a solid gallery plugin that would allow for an unlimited number of galleries, and an unlimited number of images in each. They can be used to showcase student artwork, or his own pieces for sale.

Screenprinting studio site includes:

  • Design and Development
  • Custom WordPress Theme
  • PayPal Integration for Simple Shopping Cart

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