Idea friday – Finish Sunday

When the Ideas come, they don’t stop. I work up early on friday to get some work done before I went to my last day of my winter internship at Tellart when I came up with an idea. 

One of my sites, TheGiant.org, is home to a community of over 2500 art collectors. It is just over 3 years old, but friday morning I felt compelled to make it possible to allow the members of the forum to keep track of their Shepard Fairey works. My last semester starts tomorrow, so I knew I had to finish it by tonight. 

I got it done faster than I thought I would, and I think it came out better, and having more functionality than I thought it would when I started it. I managed to interface with the existing database to handle users, messaging etc. The add-on allows users to track their owned, selling, and wanted prints, and even allows for privacy settings for each list. Users can also take advantage of the friends feature the site has and set lists as friends only. Each user has a URL can link to, to allow them to see their collection. The site also allows users to search others wanted/selling/trading lists to help each other find the pieces they want.

The entire system was built in an AJAX fashion which actually made it much faster to code the php.

Mootools allowed me to make the interaction of the site much nicer, and give a lot more feedback to the user when things happen, and the MooTools AJAX allowed me to reduce the entire system down to only 3 pages. The layover system I normally use is called SmoothBox, but for what ever reason wouldn’t work inside of MediaWiki (Where the user adds prints to their collection). I figured I’d give it a shot and make one my self. Knowing some tricks in css (full bowser compatible transparency etc) , I was actually able to do it in 3 lines of JavaScript. It surprised me how well it worked, and SmoothBox never worked on the iPhone, but mine did. Maybe Ill write plugin of my own sometime.

Where I am now.

It’s been a year and a few months since I first fell on this world. I guess it’s actually been almost exactly a year since I knew of Interaction design.

2 Summers ago I decited that a project of mine (www.RISDpedia.com) needed a better interface, and a completely new way of adding to it.

So I picked up a book on PHP and MYSQL and got to reading.

Well since then I have done a lot… I think. Really this is just a recap of what I have done so I can remember it.

• RISDpedia | A collaborative website for artists and designers to share info on how we work.
• Life Cycle Analysis Calculator | Calculate the footprint of individual products
• Design for Obama | Place to contribute your artwork for Obama, and vote on others.
• RISD Calendar | An AJAX calendar design to display many, many events on a single day.
• Respond|Design | A school group that focuses on social and global change. (great back end)
• Visual Business Solutions | Got to make money some how right? (also great back end)
• TimeCard | A web application to keep track of students worked hours (And a lot of other stuff)