Easy! Reader

This has been one crazy Fall work-wise, so I apologize for the scarcity of posts, but I do have a few holiday treats for you.

From my day job at Cronin and Company, we've got Cronin's "Grab Bag of Goodness." As with most internal projects, this was a major rush job. I take no credit for the design (which was handed to me with no wiggle room), but when it comes to the CSS and DOM Scripting, that I'll proudly take credit for. Use the code "9301″ to get in. Of particular note in this piece:

• Taking a page from Dan's Bulletproof Logos, most all of the text is in (shock) images. Toss in the text as an alt attribute and with images and CSS off, you're still golden. As this was a one-off, sIFR seemed like overkill.
• Ooh, check out that marquee. Brings back memories, doesn't it. Well, this one's a little different. The markup is an ul and each item is a li. CSS makes it all display: inline; and then JavaScript keeps reducing the margin-left of the first li by 2px until the absolute value of it's margin-left is greater than the li's width. That li is then plucked from the front of the list and appended to the end. Though I am not a big fan of scrolling marquees, this was a pretty fun experiment.
• Those animated icons you can click to make a donation are actually form controls. Originally, I had made them into custom submit inputs, but Safari's inability to customize certain form controls made me abandon that element in favor of button. It's a great effect too (IMHO).

Then there's the Easy Designs holiday card. I will spare the commentary on this one with the exception of giving major props to Dave for building the game in a day. I'm pretty darn proud of it, especially since we pretty much went from concept to execution in a matter of days (yeah, procrastination's a bitch). If you're interested, you can see a rough approximation of the email that went out (our first Campaign Monitor mailing) or simply play the game.

That beautiful bastion of standards-based e-commerce, Karova, has gotten a face lift. Mr. Malarkey deserves many kudos for yet another rich, engaging and playful design. And if you think the sales materials look good, you should see the store management dashboard. I was offered a sneak peek and couldn't help but fawn over its sophisticated simplicity. It's not only usable, but it makes managing a web shop (dare I say it) kinda fun. For a little background on the redesign, read Andy's writeup.

Now if only we could find a suitable partner to bring their product to the US (hint, hint).

My friends at Gartner are hiring a new member for their web team. If you are within commuting distance of Stamford, CT (about 45 minutes outside of NYC by train), I highly recommend considering this job as I know first-hand how awesome this team is to work with.

You'll need the following areas of knowledge (in addition to a thirst for more):

• The big 3: XHTML, JavaScript and CSS including browser compatibility issues and working with complex CSS (some of which is courtesy of yours truly)
• XML & XSLT (specifically in converting XML to XHTML)
• Some PHP/MySQL
• RSS
• web graphics (at least enough to translate from comp to code)
• Teamsite templating (not necessary, but would be an advantage)

If you're interested, email my friend Aidan (aidan [dot] brewer [at] gartner [dot] com) and let him know I sent you.