This site’s for a sister company to a previous website I built at the start of the year. It was an interesting company that supply stitching machines to the printing trade. I love design and I currently work in digital signage, so seeing the old type-setting kits for traditional signage was very knowledgeable and rewarding.
If your a large printing company be sure to visit R T Harrison LTD for stitching machines and supplies.
I’ve worked at Digital Media Projects for almost two years now, and we have finally gone live with the third revision of the website. The site was designed and built by your truly and features some really cool CSS and JavaScript.
For a company who specializes in new media and modern technologies are website was dry, static and boring. It didn’t reflect the exciting environment we all work in and wasn’t growing at the same speed as the company.
We wanted the new website to be accessible by anyone anywhere without losing anything in design. This includes video, animations and image heavy content.
Take the image above: It uses only CSS and no images, it works in every browser we tested! We also included video that will play on iPhone, iPad and any device that can handle flash. But one of my favorites is our 3D box render which also works on the iPhone and iPad.
I included a news page on the site so check us out for updates on IPTV, Digital Signage and other broadcasting technologies.
Ever wanted to catch a users attention or provide them with important information but there away browsing Facebook or Twitter. Well Here is a simple solution with tab alerts.
Well quite simply it updates the web-pages title attribute when a user is inactive or browsing in another tab. When the user returns the title returns to the original state.
This demo changes the title to show the user they have a new message in their inbox.
var myVar = new tabAlert({
text: 'You have one new message.'
});
This demo shows a goal alert.
var myVar = new tabAlert({
text: 'GOAL FLASH: Manchester United 0:1 LEEDS UNITED (Beckford 19',
ticker: true,
speed: 200,
onLoop: function(){
checkForMoreGoals();
}
});
This is my first MooTools plugin. I don’t usually get to time to write one (The process of submitting your first takes forever)! But it’s up and you can download it here.
This demo is for a folding pull-out menu that uses CSS3 elements and JavaScript only. It uses no images or flash to produce the effect although they could be used to enhance the natural feel.
I’ve seen this effect used before but most recently in a tech demo for Microsoft’s “Courier”. Below is a snippet of how this menu system works:
My Idea was to build this using DHTML only. No Flash, Canvas or SVG but pure HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
The Pullout menu comprises of five HTML elements a,b,c,d and a handle. Elements a,b,c,d are positioned and then skewed to give the effect of a folding object.
When the handle is pulled outwards the width of the elements is stretched and the skew becomes less. This and some colouring effects in JavaScript give the effect of a fold.
I added a simple “on complete” event that detects when the menu is fully opened. The event can be used to trigger any JavaScript you like. I also tinkered with a revert animation that was triggered if the menu was released without being fully open, although this was cool it made it impossible to view the code frame-by-frame in firebug.
The animation I used doesn’t seem natural to me, this was down to my lack of understanding in perspective drawings and transitions. Im sure someone with a better understanding could make a much better example from this concept. Maybe if images, gradients and shadows were introduced the effect would start to feel more natural.
If anyone does improve the menu could you let me know. I’d be really interested to see it.
This is a pseudo way to flip HTML elements on their backs. This is a way of doing it now without waiting for a possible introduction of 3D Transforms from webkit.
I first used flipping a few years ago when building touch screen HTML applications for kiosks. The animation would basically make the elements width 0 whilst moving the elements position right. This would give the effect that the element had been “sort of” flipped. It was a very simple solution and would only work if the animation was fast. Tricking the human eye into thinking it was actually flipped.
Well firstly CSS3 allows you to skew, not screw! but skew. Skew allows you to give a simple pseudo 3D effect. It’s not ideal for this example but until 3D Transforms come in, it greatly adds to the effect of tricking the eye into thinking the element has been flipped.
The animation works in three steps:
The first step goes from: [width: curWidth, left: 0, skew: 0deg 0deg] to: [width: 0, left: initialWidth/2, skew: 0deg 20deg]. This gives the effect that the element has been flipped like a playing card onto its thinnest edge, essentially you cannot see it at this stage.
The second step triggers any javaScript you want to happen. In my examples I add a class to the element called “toggleTrue” which can be used to change the CSS properties of the box. Potentially videos, images or text could be inserted creating a sort of flipping lightbox.
The third and final step animates the element from it’s side to it’s back-facing plane. The animation goes from: [width: 0, left: initialWidth/2, skew: 0deg -20deg] to: [width: initialWidth, left: 0, skew: 0deg 0deg]. Notice the skew changes from step one’s finishing position to a negative value, without doing this it looks as if the card has gone 90deg and back again.
When I initially did this a few years ago I would use an image tag and just flip that. This was because changing the width of an image stretches the image and using background-image wouldn’t do that, until now that is. By using the CSS3 property “background-size” I can set the width to 100%, this makes the background-image stretch as the container does.
I did experiment with CSS3 animations and failed quite quickly. The problem i found was the absence of a javaScript callback method. There might be one but I couldn’t work out how and without a callback, CSS animations seem quite useless to me.
I also tried using CSS3 3D transforms. This looks much better than skew because the element is actually flipped – No moving the elements position, no tricks of the eye, no fakery! The problem was that JavaScript manipulation of these CSS3 3D transforms seemed to create some crazy artefacts in the picture.
Take a look at the code in firebug and see how it works. If you know how to use firebug’s console try setting the effects speed using “effectSpeed = 1000;”. This slows the animation down. Please leave your comments and thoughts below.
These examples came about when experimenting with the extend property in MooTools. By extending the styles class I could add CSS3 properties into the Core MooTools framework and do CSS3 animations.
Bellow is the Mozilla code to extend MooTools with the Border-Radius and Box-Shadow:
var newStyles = new Hash({
'MozBorderRadius': '@px @px @px @px',
'MozBoxShadow': '@px @px @px rgb(@, @, @)'
});
$extend(Element.Styles, newStyles);
The WebKit code is slightly different. For some reason i couldn’t get the webkitBorderRadius to work without doing each corner individually. For more info on the differences read this
var newStyles = new Hash({
'webkitBorderBottomLeftRadius': '@px @px',
'webkitBorderBottomRightRadius': '@px @px',
'webkitBorderTopLeftRadius': '@px @px',
'webkitBorderTopRightRadius': '@px @px',
'webkitBoxShadow': 'rgb(@, @, @) @px @px @px'
});
$extend(Element.Styles, newStyles);
For the animations we can now simply use the same MooTools FX and we would use with CSS2. Below is an example for FireFox:
$("h31").set('morph', {
duration: 300,
transition: 'Sine:out'
});
$("h31").addEvents({
'mouseover': function(){
this.morph({
'MozBorderRadius': '8px 8px 30px 30px'
});
},
'mouseout': function(){
this.morph({
'MozBorderRadius': '30px 30px 8px 8px'
});
}
});
And that’s it really. Very simple to set up and the animations are smooth and stylish. The example will work on any WebKit browser including Chrome and Safari and Mozilla browsers including FireFox.
A new website design for PH Engineering Limited. The site is a simple clean design incorporating some clever JavaScript and stylish CSS. This was the companies first website and I was pleased to get offered Creative Control on this project.
The only thing I was given before this project was a logo: its rare to get such freedom when designing a website but in this case I had a blank canvas. After only one design proof the client was happy enough to let me get stuck in with the code.