On Saturday, inspired by Paul Annett’s Channel 4 logo, I decided to build a parallax illusion in the browser.

Here’s the end result: http://maban.co.uk/sandbox/parallax-illusion/

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At Barcamp London 7, I gave a presentation on some CSS tricks I learnt while building Scrunchup.  Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I gave a talk at a web conference called Tomorrow’s Web. I gave a summary of some of the conference talks here.

The reason I did this talk is because I am concerned that young web designers and developers are jumping into freelancing without much thought, and then discovering how much of a minefield it can be. So I decided to cover things like how to set up, what sort of problems young freelancers come across, and what I’ve learned from the mistakes I’ve made. I hope you find it useful.

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Chessbrook is the second school I have worked with.  It was a really great project to work on because it was quite challenging.  The school is an education centre for students who have not been able to cope in mainstream education.

I really like what Chessbrook are doing, and they were perfect clients to work with.  At the end of the project, I did usability testing with the students to get their feedback on the website.

I worked on the HTML and CSS for Clearleft’s dConstruct 2009 website, using microformats to mark up the schedules and locations.

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While interning at Clearleft, I helped work on the front end code for the Mozilla Addons site, pair programming with Natalie Downe.

This was the first project I worked on while interning at Clearleft. I pair programmed with Natalie Downe on the HTML and CSS.

While attending a Business Link course on starting up, I met Nicola Dolan, a lady who was setting up her own company that offered IT Training courses.  I worked with Nicola to design the branding for her company, and also designed and developed her website.  I had fun building a nice jQuery accordion menu for the course outlines page.

The Portland Arms pub website was commisioned by the landlady to provide information to locals about events at the pub, as well as an up-to-date seasonal menu. The pub dog, Buster, updates his online blog (http://www.theportlandarmspub.co.uk/blog/bustersblog.html) with his perspective of life at the Portland Arms, with photos of the people, and other dogs, he meets.

The landlady takes photos using her iPhone of the food served in the kitchen and uploads them to the website via Flickr. She also takes photos at special events, and these are automatically posted to a slideshow on the site (http://www.theportlandarmspub.co.uk/gallery.php). Many locals didn’t know where the pub was, so I added a Google map which shows users where the pub is, and they can plan their route to the pub using this feature.

The British Band Instrument Company website was launched as an online brochure of instruments being sold to across the world, specifically in the Middle East. I added a translation feature, and made all the text editable so it could be translated into different languages. After some research, I placed the navigation on the right rather than the left because people in the Middle East read from right to left. I also added images onto the buttons (using the “sliding doors” technique) so that the user could visually distinguish the instruments. I used the sliding doors technique to speed up load time and ensured the site was usable on IE6 at a screen resolution of 800×600, as I anticipated that many users in this part of the world would not have fast Internet speeds or high-end technology.

I built the Britball Run website while working at Kempt.  It’s a car tour event held in the UK that raises money for various charities.  I found it quite a challenge because I don’t know much about cars, but it was a fun project nonetheless.

St Albans Girls school is my secondary school. While I was studying there, I wrote to them asking whether they would consider a redesign of their website, which they agreed to. The old website was ‘not fit for purpose’ as one parent noted on the current website questionnaire feedback form which was sent to all parents. I started this project in October 2007, and it launched in Spring 2008.
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A few months ago, I was asked by the head of the Spanish department at my school whether I could make a preloader for some Flash audio lessons he’d made. I guess word must have got round the staff room that I knew a bit about the software! He explained that he ran a website called Proidiomas teaching people who speak Spanish how to speak English. After sending him the functioning preloader, he asked me to do some other projects including making a Flash game and redesigning his website. So here’s how it went…

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Had a nice surprise this week. A friend who had asked me to look/play about with a menu she’d made for her dad’s Thai takeaway contacted me to say the logo I’d done for it was being used as their shop sign! I’ve designed so much stuff that’s only seen on computers that when it does get made into something that’s bigger than me… very cool!

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