Web sites I’ve designed!
Craig and I mashed up of two of his creations – Sun Boxes and Moon Phases – for the eclipse on the 21st. If you let the app know your location, it will use local data to begin at dawn, climax during the eclipse’s maximum obscuration, and end at dusk. If you aren’t in the US (or if you want to know what the eclipse “sounds like” in a different location), you’ll also be able to choose a location instead.
Check it out here when the time comes:Â http://www.craigcolorusso.com/apps/sun-phases/
I just spent a fair bit of time figuring this out and thought I’d document it in case someone else is looking for the same thing.
What I wanted to do was center some text if there was only one line, but left-align it if the text spilled over to a second (or more) line:
After going down a bit of a rabbit hole w/r/t ::first-line and :text-align-last, and even considering employing some JavaScript, I realized there’s actually a pretty vanilla way of achieving the effect:
div.parent { text-align: center; }
p.child { display: inline-block; clear: both; margin: 0 auto; text-align: left; }
I was once again tapped by my good friend Craig Colorusso to build a web-based sound installation honoring the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December 2012.
Animating CSS gradients in a browser (indeed, in as many of them as possible) posed particular challenges, especially with regard to processor load. In the end, we were able to find a good middle ground between Craig’s vision and technical reality.
My husband is a musician. He recently decided to brush up on his sight-reading, but was having a hard time finding pieces he’d never seen to practice on. Â He off-handedly mentioned to me that it would be great if there were a website that would just keep feeding him new, random pieces to sight-read.
“If only there was a website that…” The words that launched 1,000 ships! Needless to say, DLE was on the job and only a few months later we launched New Piece, Please!
Attentive.ly was started by by a couple of Fission Strategy alums to help organizations broaden their focus from email campaigns to social media services like Twitter and Facebook.  They brought me on to revamp the interface for both the dashboard experience and the public facing marketing site.
Rather than begin with static wireframes, we went immediately into a rapid prototyping phase using the Foundation framework. For design, we leveraged a couple of Theme Forest themes, which got us quickly into front-end development.
Through Collective UX, I took the lead on reorganizing Warner Bros. Games’ purchase and account flows for web as well as several gaming platforms. Â The games we focused on were for 6-10 year olds, so the parental involvement aspect afforded some very interesting challenges!
Deliverables included Axure flows and wireframes.
ActBlue brought me in to redesign their public-facing website, giving it a “tech solution” marketing makeover. I did a quick round of wireframing to nail down the structure, several rounds of design honing in on a dynamic design, as well as template front-end development, leveraging Twitter Bootstrap.
Fission Strategy came to me with Our Time’s Voting Widget needing a major interaction overhaul with a very quick turnaround (it was May and they wanted to get people registering for the fall election STAT). Over the course of a few brainstorming sessions, I helped them get users registering and sharing their registration experience with minimal friction in a tiny amount of space. Great challenge for a great cause!
At long last, I am very excited to announce the launch of the Sun Boxes Mobile App in both the iOS (iTunes) store and the Android store! Â Â You may recall from an earlier post that I built the Sun Boxes website last year. Â Sun Boxes is a sound installation by Craig Colorusso that uses solar power to play a series of guitar drone notes out of single speakers. Â Sounds mundane, perhaps, but it is one of the most humbly powerful pieces of art I’ve seen recently. Â I feel lucky to be a part of its momentum!
Our aim with the mobile app was not only to give users an easy way to interact with the piece by themselves, but also to encourage them to stage their own installation of the piece by turning their and their friend’s devices into individual Sun Boxes.
  
For this project, I was user experience designer, graphic designer, as well as front-end developer. Back-end development was handled expertly by my long-time collaborator and all around kind person, Mark Henderson. He created an API for the project, so you can expect more interfaces to join the fray soon.
Having never built an app myself (I’ve only designed them in the past), I have many, many resources to thank in making this possible. Â First and foremost, we leveraged the Phonegap platform in order to develop for both iOS and Android simultaneously, using the web technologies we already know and love. Â Steven Levithan‘s Date Format plug-in made handling times much easier than it would have otherwise been. Â Jason Job’s epic blog post about archiving and distributing iOS builds saved me from utter failure more than once.
And, as always, I would never get past “hello” without the amazing community that is Stack Overflow.
My pal Mark and I launched Some Demands on October 15, 2011, 28 days after the first gathering in Zucotti Park (and three days after having the idea for the site!). While public support of #occupy was rising, so were criticisms that the movement had no clear goals.
We started Some Actions on November 4, 2011, as Occupy Oakland called for and carried out a general strike. Growing numbers of people were asking what they could do to get involved beyond occupying public spaces.
Together, these two sites are known as Some Sites, and they aim to provide an open space for suggesting and voting on what needs to change and how to change it.
This project is near and dear to my heart. Â Sun Boxes is something I want as many people as possible to experience and it’s really satisfying to get to be part of making that happen.
The most exciting part of the site is the part I didn’t build!  The incomparable Sean Carstensen put together a Flash-based app which allows web users to hear the cycle of sounds that comprise Sun Boxes while seeing a slideshow of the boxes in action.  We hope to expand this experience to mobile devices, and to add functionality that encourages users to “stage” Sun Boxes on their own with as many devices as they have at hand.
Also coming soon: the Sun Boxes store! T-shirts, recordings, and things so exciting I’m not allowed to tell you about them!
I built the site on the WordPress platform, with jQuery as the primary JS platform.  For the newsletter sign-up, I used Quad’s excellent script for using AJAX on the DreamHost list signup form.  I did mod it slightly, as I am using more than the customary name and email fields on the site.  In order to avoid the tedium of spelling out each extra variable, I modded Quad’s submitToList() function to just grab every non-submit form input and serialized it all using jQuery’s serializeArray() function.  Damn if that wasn’t just easy as pie!
Check it out: http://www.sun-boxes.com/
If you’ve worked in a corporate office before, you’ve likely come across someone who continues to be employed there despite seeming to do no work at all.
One former coworker of mine seemed to have an endless supply of one-liners that masterfully deflected work while leaving his facade of competence untarnished. Â Over time, I began to associate him with the Melville short story Bartleby the Scrivener in my mind. Â I also started to keep a list of his work-defying quips.
After a while, I felt strongly that ALL workers EVERYWHERE should have access to this magical power, and thus the idea of the Bartleby the 8 Ball Android app was born: A device, much like the Magic 8 Ball, that produces a suitable retort whenever someone comes at you with unpleasant work to do.
My very good friend Craig Colorusso asked me to make a website for his very amazing installation piece Sun Boxes.  If you ever have the opportunity to see Sun Boxes live and in-person, I highly recommend doing so — it’s a truly unique and inspiring experience.
This one-page site is merely placeholder for a more fleshed out blog site to come!
My pal Ryan Walsh had been collecting recordings of readings of DFW works for quite a while when he approached me about putting them together on a website. Â The result is, happily, one of the most-visited sites I’ve ever worked on! And a great tribute to my favorite author.