Reality Theory

I can hardly believe it’s been over a year already since I first set up the website of author Cynthia Kraack.  This year she’s got another book and a NEMBA award under her belt and was ready to freshen things up a little.  I gave the content a full update and worked in some more font stylings for modern browsers through @font-face.  Additionally, she consolidated her book site for Minnesota Cold into the site by incorporating a new books subsection.

Here’s another custom WordPress site I designed and developed. This site was built for a local Director of Photography named Bob Vaaler, who does a lot of shoots here in Minneapolis. 

Bob wanted a clean, minimalist look which pushed his production and work samples to the forefront.  The site makes use of pretty clean HTML/CSS and a little bit of @font-face to spice up the text a bit.  There’s a customized flash video player as well as some video thumbnails scattered throughout since Bob preferred to avoid the use of YouTube for the video.

I custom designed and built this site for the local Minnesota chapter of the American College of Nurse Midwives (ACNM). This professional organization for midwives needed a place to house information for both midwives and patients which they could update themselves. I did so via yet another WordPress site… I sense a pattern developing here .

The design sought to capture some of the vibrancy of life both in mothers and children. In addition to integrating content pages and a news post archive, this site incorporates a twitter, blog RSS and facebook feed in order to help the local community tap into the social media campaign already underway on a national level. There’s also a custom contact form built in.

A client has just launched a game I developed, Excel Hero.  This game tests your skill at Microsoft Excel keyboard shortcuts.  Exciting, right?  Well, if you’re a hardcore Excel user, this game is actually pretty fun.  There’s a countdown timer and high score as well as a random selection of shortcuts to test your skill that get increasingly difficult.  I executed all the flash development in partnership with a guy who came up with the idea and Matt Coffee, who designed/illustrated the sweet landing page.

The simplicity of the game (and the strange requirement to click in a field below the game) mask a ridiculous challenge that the game presented: capturing literally every keystroke.  Of particular “joy” was the Alt (Option) key which Flash Plugin has no access to. Another fun thing that required significant hackery was the fact that  your web browser thinks it should be in charge of common shortcuts like Print (Ctrl-P) and the like.

What made this all possible was leaving Javascript 100% in charge of blocking and capturing literally all keystrokes and then handing their keycodes off to Flash to interpret as they related to the current challenge.  In the end, a triple-tag-team of Flash, Javascript and PHP ultimately provide a fairly seamless experience on both Firefox and IE.  Rumor has it Chrome doesn’t play well.  So it goes.  Good times.

Pixel Farm is a Minneapolis post-production company specializing in visual FX, video, audio, Blu-ray DVD, etc etc. It’s also where I work, the parent company to Pixel Farm Interactive. I made the Pixel Farm blog as part of their online rebranding effort. It is companion site to a new flash-based spot library site which is nearing completion. More on that later.

A custom WordPress site I did for upcoming speculative fiction writer, Cynthia Kraack.  She has completed her first book, Minnesota Cold, and is already working on a second.  The site includes some of the client’s photography, excerpts from the book, and some audio recordings by the author herself.  The client is now free to manage the site herself through WordPress’s slick CMS.

In building this template from scratch, I learned some nifty tricks that can be done easily using WordPress’s Template Tags and conditional logic…

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