A little over five years ago I was blessed with the opportunity to join the web design team at Yell. I had no relevant work experience and no formal training in anything web-related. Luckily I had landed on my feet and had the support of some very knowledgeable, and more importantly, very likeable people.
Over the years this team tamed my naive enthusiasm and guided it in a very positive direction. Fuelled by their experience and encouragement I was able learn more about the web than I ever thought possible. More importantly I found myself in the very rare and very privileged position of looking forward to going to work on a Monday morning.
This month I was very proud to be promoted to Head of User Interface and take on the leadership of the very team which made me. My only hope is that I can give back half as much to the team as the team has given me.
Thanks - Chris, Rob, Rupert, Jill, Mel, Nick, Leigh, Rachel, Adam, Paul, Matt, Magnet, Grant, Franco, Carlo and everyone else.
This week saw the launch of Remote-Tilt, a new side project that I have been working on with Remy Sharp. I can’t take any credit for the idea or indeed the value that the tool delivers but I have tremendously enjoyed designing the brand and building the responsive layout behind the promotional site.
The best way to explain the project is to watch Remy’s video…
Floating in space
Whilst playing with Remy’s prototype I found my self being drawn to the demos involving the rotation of an object on screen. Sure it’s a mightily clever bit of code that will save mobile app developers hours of tedium but that aside it’s kinda fun to play with.
The ability to control a virtual object floating in a virtual space by rotating your actual phone back in the real world is pretty futuristic and it was this concept that stuck with me when I first started designing the site.
Choosing a font
I wanted to create a logo that wasn’t flat. If I was going to capture the magic of the app I needed the logo to exist in more than one plane. I started with the words “RemoteTilt” and started thinking about ways to introduce some kind of 3D transformation.
I decided that if I was going to distort the words and they were to remain readable then the starting point needed to be as uniform and as clear as possible. I decided to use Bell Gothic Standard Black because it was a fairly plain sans-serif font that was easy to read and had a nice consistent aesthetic.
To increase the consistency even further I opted for BLOCK CAPITALS. The capital “I” had some bizarre pseudo-serifs which I wasn’t keen on so I converted the text to paths and manually removed them as shown below.
Taking a different perspective
The next challenge was to introduce the 3D element. I tapered each word at one end to add a sense of perspective and to make the logo appear to bend away from you in the middle. With the text all in one colour it still looked kind of flat. It looked like it could have been made of sponge and had just been squeezed in the middle where the letters get shorter.
To try and reinforce the idea that the two halves were separate I switched to using 2 colours and slightly increased the gap between the two words.
The illusion was coming along nicely but it still wasn’t as 3D as the mesmerizing prototype demo I was trying to recreate. I decided to add two contrasting planes to the design to emphasize the bend between the two words. I also added a slight rotation so that the planes and indeed the logo itself would exist on a more complicated compound angle rather than being perfectly horizontal.
Getting the paints out
At this point I was fairly happy with where I had got to but the design was still undeniably Remy Grey ™. I immediately started experimenting with green. I’ve got no idea why but I suspect it is probably something to do with my old design boss being a die hard celtic fan. A pinch of noise and a smattering of radial gradient later I arrived at the final design.
From this logo and colour scheme the rest of the site layout evolved fairly quickly. There were a few alterations needed along the way to ensure the site was responsive and well supported on smartphones and tablets but it was only a matter of a couple of evenings from inception to execution.
The finished site can be viewed at http://remote-tilt.com/. For maximum CSS bells and whistles you will probably want to view it in chrome.
The project seems to have been well received with numerous mentions on twitter and a rather complimentary article on .net.
Thanks for the project Remy, I look forward to the next one.
Last week I was involved in a discussion which amongst other topics covered working with github and building javascript apps with client-side MVC frameworks such as backbone.js. Whilst I had a vague awareness of both I was unable to contribute very much to the conversation due to a lack of hands-on experience. Feeling rather frustrated by this I decided to grab the bull by the horns and jump straight into building a new backbone app and pushing the source code to github.
Last night, as a result, drinklist was born. The app itself is currently very basic and is neither intended to change the world nor make me famous. What I do however hope is that overtime it will evolve into a respectable code example which will cover some skills that I have not yet found an opportunity to implement in my current job.
Next we used express.js, a node web framework, to rapidly build and deploy a data-driven webapp complete with custom url routing, and EJS page templating. As if this wasn’t already enough, we then wrote another line or two of code to add a fully functional JSON API to provide access our site’s data… amazing!
For me this was the highlight of the day. The speed with which new prototypes can be built and deployed is astonishing. Express JS kind of reminded me of the CodeIgniter PHP framework except it was quicker and easier to work with in almost every respect.
After a very impressive two course lunch, complete with a salad bar (all included in the ticket price) we headed back to the classroom to learn how to create a variety of web servers to support:
For the lazier readers amongst you, there is a good summary of all these technologies over at the HTML5Doctor blog.
Unfortunately, due to evolution of the workshop syllabus throughout Remy’s tour, learning about databases (MongoDB) was no longer in scope for the course. However, thanks to the solid foundation I got from the rest of the course, I am now confident that I can work this part out on my own.
WARNING: After a couple of beers it seems Remy has a tendency to get over-excited whilst demoing his pet projects. If there are any full pints on the table, get your laptop and bag out of the way ASAP!
All in all a great day. I left feeling inspired to build new things, eager to learn more and smelling somewhat beery, thanks Remy.
Today I received notification from Apple that my first iPhone app submission had been approved for the app store.
#RDGGEEK is a native Objective-C app that displays the speakers and talk descriptions for Reading Geek Night events past, present and future. The app is powered by a JSON feed from the main Reading Geek Night website. The event data is stored offline and updated every time the app is launched.
The #RDGGEEK app can now be downloaded from the app store.
I have just completed a fantastic three-day iPhone development course run by @aral.
The course was an excellent introduction to xCode, Objective-C and the iOS SDK. In addition to this it really helped to cement the principles of OOP in my mind. Much to my delight, the example projects were very well thought out and could be applied to many real world applications.
Aral was a knowledgeable and enthusiastic teacher with a real passion for user experience. Big thanks to Yell for funding my place on the course and an even bigger thanks to Aral for opening the door to the App Store.
To find out more details about future dates for this course check out Aral’s website.
