I am so proud of this project. When the video production company Enjoy Human decided they wanted to radically revamp their site for 2010, we sat down together and planned everything out thoroughly. They knew they wanted something sleek, clean, and designed for widescreen monitors. But beyond that, they didn’t get too hung up on the trivial aesthetics like a lot of clients do (“Can we get the icons in periwinkle blue?”), and instead focused on how to effectively present their impressive body of work. There were no last minute direction changes, no jumping from a horse to an elephant in mid-stride so to speak. The clear focus of all parties resulted in a clean, intuitively usable design, and some of the most beautifully efficient code I’ve ever produced.

In addition to designing and coding the site templates, I set up a high definition Flash video player that would handle varying aspect ratios. This player is integrated into the surrounding page in such a way that the page will adapt to the dynamic size and shape of the player. The video library is powered by wordTube, a Wordpress plugin I co-developed.

I created a custom Wordpress plugin to power the homepage featured content slideshow, which is a Flash AS3 application I built from scratch. Enjoy Human 2010 also uses a thumbnail generation plugin I built, originally for Antiquiet.

Check out the live site at enjoyhuman.com.

So it’s not the prettiest site to look at, but it’s got some of my best code under the hood.

Butler Sourcing, a manufacturer in China, approached me through recommendation in December of 2009. They had a very complex vision that they were having trouble realizing with their outsource teams. They wanted to create a template for a series of websites for specific products. The template would need to be tweaked visually for each site of course, but it also needed to feature an interactive quote wizard that a user could use to “build” a customized product.

I developed a custom Wordpress plugin and a Wordpress theme to achieve this. The plugin allows Butler to set up an arbitrary number of “steps” for each site, and then an arbitrary number of options for each step, each with an image. The design will automatically flex for any combination, and accommodate option images of wildly varying shapes and sizes. Butler has the ability to let a step accept only one selected option, or multiple options.

I also developed a custom Wordpress plugin to display a dynamic jQuery slideshow of examples for each site.

I delivered all of this to Butler in less than one month.

Try my wizard out on a live site here.

I don’t think any of my favorite memories of John are appropriate for public display. Suffice to say that everything noteworthy discovered between the ages of 15 and 18, I discovered with John. From the third Led Zeppelin album, to casual substance abuse, to Girls.

Which, like Led Zeppelin, must be capitalized.

It’s impossible to properly articulate the nature of that bond with words alone. You could break out of Alcatraz with someone, and yet it still wouldn’t be anything like escaping childhood.

It doesn’t just affect you, it doesn’t change you. It really defines you.

I don’t just think of John, he’s a part of me. To this day, I hear his laugh whenever I see something he would have found funny. When I set up a wisecrack, it’s his voice in my head telling me how to pace it. Coz, Alan if you’re out there, you guys too. I feel like the four of us went to the movies, caught a new one called Life, and everything we saw that day became inside jokes between us forever.

I don’t personally believe in any kind of idealogical afterlife, but John gave me something to aspire to, something worth earning. He’s alive. He’s immortal. At least to us. He walked out to a permanent standing ovation from everyone in his audience. Not just for showing up, but because he was amazing.

I built a combination video player / image scroller for Charlize Theron’s Africa Outreach Project homepage. It was built from scratch in Flash AS3, and communicates with the existing audio player using Flash LocalConnection.

Check out the live version here!

Justin Dettle reviews extreme heavy metal music for Antiquiet. He’s got so much to say, we decided to give him his own blog dedicated to metal. I threw this together one weekend, after commissioning a badass logo from the very talented Wes DeSoto. Designing this site was so fun. The stone texture is a photograph I took in my backyard.

Visit Heavy Dettle

I helped launch the official Febreze Home Collection’s Facebook page by developing a Facebook application that added a custom-built interactive Flash widget to a “Design Tips” tab.

Check it out here!

It’s about time I add this one. I created Antiquiet in 2007 with Johnny Firecloud. I designed it (we’re on our fourth version), I built it, I write for it, I shoot video for it, I edit video for it, I record and edit live sound for it, I throw events, design flyers, design ads, sell ads, traffic ads, I manage our SEO- which is great- I do business development, I administer the server, the works. I don’t know why this wasn’t the first thing into my portfolio, but when I say I can do it all, Antiquiet backs it up.

View Antiquiet Live

I was a bit of a swiss army knife on this project. I built the initial HTML/CSS shell (please view my work here; the live version has been hacked apart a bit since, but I’m proud of the code I delivered). I also did some extensive AJAX work on the Drink Recipes page, and I built the hybrid HTML/video jQuery feature panel, which was a strangely complex custom order; The client wanted it to open with a Flash video, play through that video only once, and then seamlessly begin sliding through a series of panels assembled dynamically from the contents of flagged WordPress posts.

Antiquiet’s a passion project of mine, and there’s not much to these banners. But I’m proud of them, because they all feature classic quotes from one on one conversations we had with headlining artists. They really capture the rock n’ roll attitude and energy that I would like to consider my specialty.