October gave me the pleasure of completing the Extract Coffee Roasters’ website. Based on a cracking design by Superfantastic, this site gave me another opportunity to stretch my HTML5/CSS3 legs, but more importantly to learn how to use the excellent Big Cartel e-commerce platform to create the consumer shop part of the site.
I’ve used a few different e-commerce platforms and plugins for WordPress but it goes without saying that, so far, Big Cartel’s is the easiest to use and implement. Utilising a simple HTML templating language (and you can create your own template from scratch, even using HTML5) the possibilities are pretty much endless, especially as you can host images and Javascript on your own domain, very useful if you want the shop to look and function similarly to your main site. Only problem I came across was that Selectivizr won’t work on Big Cartel because of the cross domain issue, so you have to be a bit clever with your use of CSS3 pseudo selectors and getting them to work in IE. Overall though, great platform at very reasonable prices.
So if you’re a coffee-lover, and you want to try some of the best artisan coffee out there, I’d highly recommend you check out Extract Coffee Roasters, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed!
Over the past few months in-between endless bouts of client work and personal projects I’ve also started to try my hand the dark art that is iOS icon design. It’s something I’m hugely interested in but I’ve always doubted whether I had the pure Photoshop skill to be able to create anything on a par with the best.
While I certainly don’t think I’ve quite reached those heights yet, but I’m pretty pleased with the two icons I’ve come up with here. They’re not for any particular app, more just an experiment in lighting, texture and detailing. Sadly at normal iOS sizes a lot of this detail is lost, which is a shame, but I’ve really enjoyed creating them at the larger 512px size.
Hopefully I’ll get to create an actual icon for a published app soon!
For most of April I’ve been working on a site for the The Big Feastival, a micro festival to be held on Clapham Common in support of the Jamie Oliver Foundation and The Prince’s Trust. The festival itself is going to be a mix of great music (The Charlatans, Athlete, New Young Pony Club & more) plus an added twist of serving up great food from Jamie’s own Fifteen restaurant and many others including Cafe Spice Namaste, Wahaca, Barbecoa and loads more.
The site was my first (apart from this one of course!) to use media queries in order to make it mobile-friendly, quite a challenge with such a beautiful and intricately designed site. To help me along I created my own CSS framework that scaled down to mobile (from a wide 1140px starting point right down to iPhone-size), but with a more fixed-width approach, which helped manage how many versions of the graphics we had to serve up and also help with things like jQuery image sliders (which require a width to be specified).
The site was designed by the graphical geniuses at Superfantastic, they’ve done a great job on the branding for The Big Feastival and I’m really looking forward to seeing all the work they’ve put in to the marketing collateral itself at the event. Obviously this will involve fleeting glances as I make my way around all the food stalls stuffing my face!
Tickets for the event are on sale now, so go grab a few and I’ll see you there!
Recently I took part in an impromptu hack day organised by myself and 3 friends and held at my flat. Essentially we wanted to build something cool, in 24hrs. What we came up with was Chronogr.am, an little web app that uses Instagram’s real-time API.
So what does Chronogr.am do you ask? Basically, once you’re signed in to our app (a requirement of Instagram, we wish you could just see the stream without logging in, or needing an Instagram account) you’ll centre on your geographical location. As we’re quite new there may not be any shared photos in your local area, so simply pan around the world map to find some (here’s a tip as we all live in London, there should be plenty there!). The app updates every 5 seconds, so once there are a few people subscribed to it, images should start to appear in real-time quite frequently. Click on the little marker to see an image thumbnail, rollover the image to see the caption (if the user has added one) and then if you like the pic, click on it to see it much larger.
As you can see, it’s quite a simple app, but the excitement (for us anyway) of seeing the little pins drop down as new images are shared felt pretty cool and I think I can speak for all of my fellow ‘hackers’ that we are very proud of what we got out in just 24hrs. If the app becomes popular, we have plenty of improvements and new ideas to expand upon, so if you have Instagram and like the idea, please sign up and start sharing those photos!
One final note, the rest of the team that worked on Chronogr.am were: Marty Batten, Ryan Conway and Mike Jewell. All clever and talented chaps, so check out their Twitters.
Quick turnaround for the Electric Bicycle Network website this week! This new company offers power-assisted cycling that everyone can enjoy on the hols (even unfit buggers like myself), lovely. I built this site for the guys over at Superfantastic
Superfantastic are a world-class team of designers and marketing experts that I’ve had the pleasure of working with on many of the projects featured on this site. One of them was their own website, which I helped to build and launch in December 2010. And my efforts scored me an iPad as thanks, how lovely is that!
Lawfully Chic is a fashion, art and travel blog run by Mishcon de Reya. I designed and built the site for Well Studio, the agency that looks after Mishon’s portfolio of websites.
Some tasty treats on offer this week as we’ve put the Chicken Republic site live. Designed by Superfantastic, I helped build this African-owned fast food restaurant’s site, I’ve heard the Spiced Chicken is to die for, yum.
