What To Expect When You’re Expecting CSS/HTML Handoff
Picture this: You're a designer at Fancy Design Firm, charged with building out a design that another group will implement. You might never meet this group, you don't know how adept they are with buildout, and you're not entirely sure what they'll want to do with your CSS/HTML.
Even worse, maybe you're only delivering a sliver of the site, just one or two pages, and this team will need to finish out the other 90% of the markup. You'll be credited with the buildout or blamed for it, but the final results are out of your hands. What do you do?
Or, imagine that you're a client who's hired Fancy Design Firm to design the site, and you want your Stressed-Out Internal Team to develop it. You need to make sure that S.O.I.T. can correctly implement the stuff you get from F.D.F., and you even want them to expand on it, stretching the design into a full site with new styles.
The trouble? You don't know how F.D.F. codes or what to expect from them. Whatever you get from them will be final - you can't go running back every day until launch and asking them for stylesheet tweaks. You're not a CSS/HTML expert, so you're not sure you'll be able to tell what's good or not. What do you do?
A Bad Place To Be
Both parties are in a spot here: Designers are hoping their work doesn't get mangled, and clients are hoping their deliverable isn't crappy and inflexible, but neither party has a sure-fire way to get what they want.
I've been delivering buildout a lot recently, so I've been reflecting on what works best in this situation. In the interest of helping designers and clients agree on deliverables, I've written this little reference list. This is by no means a "client bill of rights," simply a set of topics clients and designers should discuss when expecting a CSS/HTML deliverable.
Continue reading "What To Expect When You’re Expecting CSS/HTML Handoff"
Designing a Custom Flash Player for Brightcove
ABOUT BRIGHTCOVE
Brightcove offers a wide range of players that will plug right into your site. Its players range from a video window with basic controls to players with tabbed navigation, playlists, related videos, and keyword search. These players are easy to build into your site and connect with videos you've uploaded to Brightcove.
Unlike most drop-in players, Brightcove offers a great deal of customization. You can style existing players using a video player editor where you primarily have control over colors. This goes a long way when you're trying to match the look of your player with the look of your site, but you can take this a step further with a proprietary markup language called BEML (Brightcove Experience Markup Language). Think of BEML as HTML for a media player. You add custom images to replace the Brightcove custom elements (like your play or mute button for example). You also have complete control over which Brightcove components you want for your players and even which buttons you want for your player controls (play button, mute button, etc.).
However, even with base color styling and more advanced BEML modifications, you may still run into styling and component limitations. If you want to really customize your player, Brightcove allows you to take things even further with their API. So, with said API, Adobe Flex, and custom UI and visual design up front, that's what Viget did ...
Continue reading "Designing a Custom Flash Player for Brightcove"
Take Something New and Make It Old
A design exercise that has been making the rounds lately, one I can't get enough of and have to share with anyone who'll listen, is the re-imagining of modern video games, movies, albums, and so on as worn out, classic book and album covers. It takes a product completely out of its element and reinterprets what makes it memorable in the first place. The result being that oftentimes these "remixes" are more elegant and precise solutions than their original designs. They're also just plain fun. The craze seems to have started earlier this year with Olly Moss's series of video games as book covers inspired by Penguin Classics covers and Saul Bass illustration. Just to show a couple:
2009