Dc here! You hear a lot from me, and tho nothin’ goes through this place without my hands up in the pie, it’s my team of subject-matter experts that deliver big for our clients. But working this closely with so many talented people can be tough. How does collaboration handle challenge? Where does the deadline grind meet growth? Jon is gonna fill you in on his take from the daily trials and joys of a developer!
Design meets development
The web developers professional need to be creative and resourceful in order to keep up with the current trends, which are in constant motion. If you’re lucky enough to have both the designer and developer skill sets, you’ll probably avoid designing something you can’t code.
Some of us are not so lucky and we have to depend on the designs being provided. This gives the designer free creative reign, with no limitations based on what he thinks a developer, me, can or can’t do.
Makin’ magic
With the Noseworthy Chapman website, for example, the designer ran with an idea that challenged me to think outside the box and pushed me beyond my comfort zone. This is where the magic happens.
Overcoming challenges
Noseworthy Chapman’s challenge was a combination of two new design aspects that I’d seen only a few times before: flip-cards and an animated timeline as you scroll down the page.
I was eager to start researching for this site as soon as it came across my desk. The flip cards were used tastefully for social sharing and lead gen forms, two equally annoying sections to build seeing their designs are usually bland and redundant. Not this time.
The animation added another layer of unknowingness, which was surprisingly easier than I expected.
Both of these features were carried over to a more recent project: Spaces NL.
Spaces NL was a milestone website for me personally. The challenge for this one was all sections had to have animations as the page scrolled (like for Noseworthy Chapman), combined with full-width columns. The other side of this challenge was making the page templates easy to reproduce for the user inside the CMS.
Custom solutions
At this time I was comfortable breaking out full-width columns from the containers, as well as animating sections as the page was scrolling. All I needed was a way to make these beautiful templates from within the WordPress WYSIWYG. Enter custom shortcodes.
I’m a little embarrassed to admit that, up until this point, custom shortcodes were not really on my radar. After some quick research I had it figured out and began implementation for my latest creation.
With my background as a designer AND a developer, man – I get it Jon! And this is why our team kills it day after day: we work together, create together, grow together — all to brand better. Need website love? Reach out to see what our team can help you achieve!
