Get your jQuery plugin fix at: metafizzy.co
MF: I’ve always been interested in visual arts, math, and geometry. Years ago in college, I started a photography blog. I became more interested in tweaking the site than posting the photos. Learning web design was fulfilling as it satisfied my desire to create visuals and work with logic systems. The reward of putting your creative output online for thousands to see is intoxicating. Web design does an excellent job at bringing this all together.
I wanted the name of my business to be something fun and playful. What’s more joyous than tiny bubbles? Superficially, “Metafizzy” is a derivation from “metaphysics.” This topic can be a highfalutin, full of wacky concepts. Switching it to “fizzy” almost mocked it, which I think is cute.
MF: CSS transitions and transforms are that game changer and they are ready for prime time. While animation and movement have been around for years, the CSS implementation of transitions and transforms put them in the front of the web developer’s tool set. Together these features can be leveraged to create new layout paradigms and design patterns. Designers and developers will need to consider not just the visual composition of their sites, but also how movement plays a role. Dan Mall wrote a terrific article on this subject, discussing how animation can establish a brand in Real Animation Using JavaScript, CSS3, and HTML5 Video.
One of my projects, Isotope, relies heavily on animation. In fact, you could argue that it does nothing more than add a layer of animation to the sorting and filtering functionalities that have been available with server-side development. But the animation is not just a whizz-bang effect for sugarcoating. Animation significantly adds value to interaction. Movement and animation help the user understand what changes are currently transpiring. This comment on Hacker News in response to Isotope put it best:
“If you didn’t have the animation it would not be easy to see which items had risen and which fallen. You would have to compare your memory of the order before the change with what you’re looking at. This is cognitively very difficult.”
MF: I love riding my bike. My commute is short enough that I can easily bike it, which I truly enjoy. Lately at home I’ve been reading comics like The Walking Dead, Empowered, and Ex Machina.
MF: It’s a great time to be in web development. Specs are being proposed and re-written, browsers are racing one another to add in features, and developers are creating little demos that try to play around with a couple of them. I feel this push for experimenting is especially healthy for the dev community.
I love picking apart a demo or a small feature on a site to see how the developer got it done. I especially enjoy when somebody breaks the rules. That can be using a horizontal layout, adding gigantic imagery, deconstructing typography, or overloading the computing power on a web browser.
Pulley has been a tremendous boon for my business. When I first started planning out how I was going to monetize Metafizzy, other solutions required too much time-investment and offered unnecessarily complex features. As a web designer and developer, I am comforted by how you guys at Big Cartel are cut from the same cloth. You get it.
The dashboard is downright gorgeous and a pleasure to use. So much so, that it pains me to take a look at PayPal when I have to. Implementing Pulley was especially easy, and it requires little maintenance. Pulley enabled me to profit from my work, without costing me the hassle of managing online transactions. I’d recommend it for any designer or developer looking to do the same.
The crew over at iA(information Architects) use a very specific and refreshingly-simple formula when approaching each product.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in these beautiful templates offered securely through Pulley. Their store (also an example of their beautiful work and a stunning example of Big Cartel customization) showcases these templates and products in a way that clears everything not completely neccesary out of the way and organizes the good stuff for concise visual consumption.
