Web Animation & Interaction Development Projects

Back in 2015 I started curating and circulating Web Animation Weekly. In a little over a year its readership grew to 3,000 subscribers, and I brought on a features editor to help shoulder the load. Some readers donate money to help cover the costs of publication, but otherwise it is labor of love.

The next year, 2016, in keeping with my theme of gardening over gatekeeping, with the help of a few volunteers from the Web Animation Weekly community, we set up the Animation at Work Slack and a form that lets people add themselves to the Slack.

Neither of these projects would be as far along as they are without the help of volunteers and the strong backing of the community. For that I am proud.

Mozilla approached me about building an interactive site to celebrate the new visual design tools in Firefox Developer Edition 44. With only five weeks until launch, I had to come up with an arresting idea fast, so I drew from my childhood fascination with the deep sea to pitch a site full of dev tools challenges with fascinating deep sea creatures.

Production had to move fast, so I requested muscle: Mozilla put two JavaScript developers on the project and a music designer. I brought in a logo designer, a local illustrator, and a copy editor to round out the team. And yes, I rolled up my sleeves and coded a great deal of the front end as well. We made the deadline—and made something unforgettable.

For me, DevTools Challenger is proof that when we work together, we can make something greater than ourselves.

Check it out

I worked on the Lightning Design System as a consultant helping with bringing animation into the system. The motion design section of this project is a solid example of animation documentation, with a custom vocabulary, demos, and the new concept of timing scales. It was a great project with a great crew. I'm glad I got to be a part of it.

Check it out

Black Brick Road is a multimedia web comic by the Russian creator Xamag. Heavily inspired by interactive storygames like Homestuck, Black Brick Road was originally done in Flash. I teamed up with Xamag to do an early installment, a map game, using CSS animations and transitions at a time when interaction design and animation had largely withdrawn from the front end development.

Later on we teamed up again to create The Room Game, a cottage clean up game using HTML5's Drag and Drop API. This was the project that got me to leave my Job Job, and I haven't looked back. Ever since, I've been on the look out for more chances to work with wonderful creators and illustratros and bring their work and mine together.