Benjamin Barlow

Ever have those days (24 hours) of two big accomplishments? Well the last 24 hours have proved awesome in the sense that I accomplished two things that are just crazy cool!

Those two things I am referring to? One is gigantic leap forward in my understanding of WordPress and PHP with the other being a “thinking-far-out-of-the-box” idea that I had but wasn’t completely sold on. After making a proof of concept and then finishing it though, turned out freakin’ awesome.

When I took on the opportunity to complete redesign and develop The Bartell’s website, there was one requirement that I was extremely hesitant on. The homepage is essentially a page full of Event Posters or Event Information and the requirement was to to have these Event’s ordered by an Event Date and after the Event Date has been past, it would no longer show on the homepage. Sounds simple right? Well, for a guy who has a fairly limited PHP background, this is something big that I have to learn relatively quickly or get some help… relatively quickly.

So last night, I spent a good few hours heavily researching a solution. I found quite a few reliable resources but none initially helped. I gave it a half hour rest and then went back at it. I tried implementing small things first, the filtering on dates before today. After another hour, I finally had something that worked! Now on to the ordering… another hour later, SUCCESS!!

Why is this such a big deal? Not only does it satisfy The Bartell requirement, but I will be able to use this on every site hereafter! This is absolutely HUGE! :)

Second? Safe Bridge has me on a little project while I am on the bench waiting for another contract. The project is to build a powerpoint for their 10th Anniversary party in a week and a half. I spent a good day last week researching for good powerpoint design ideas and none of them stuck. Has anyone else noticed the lack of creativity in the online powerpoint design ideas? I then quit looking for powerpoint ideas and started at print design. Maybe something there would inspire me… Sure enough I pulled out a good idea that I will be using. But that’s not the cool part. I started thinking about how I wanted to design the timeline slide. The first thought was to have a really really wide timeline that would horizontally scroll across the screen. Then I started thinking about anything else that I could do with that… it kind of reminds me of… PARALLAX! The vertical scrolling websites!

So I started a proof of concept with a timeline png on textured back and it worked rather awesomely. Then it occurred to me to incorporate Safe Bridges photos from the last 10 years. The end result? The bottom third of the screen is the timeline scrolling over texture, the top two-thirds are three layers of photos all moving at different speeds with the top two layers with photos with fairly heavy drop-shadowing for added depth.

I have never seen powerpoint parallaxing done, so this is a complete first! And one that is pretty awesome to look at :)