Weeknotes 23:11

April 10, 2023

Week of April 2–8

Principal Media Catalog

My workload continued to be lighter this week. I was able to come back to the Principal Media catalog project now that we have content for the catalog. I started adding films to the WordPress database the previous week and a teammate pitched in and took some of the load.

With the content added to the database, I was able to replace the placeholder content in the template with WordPress queries and put some finishing polish on the interface before we shared the link with the client late in the week for them to do some quality assurance (QA) testing.

Our current timeline is to get QA feedback from the client by mid-week so that we can put the finishing touches on the catalog and then push the project to the live site the following week.

Particle animation

I jumped in and helped a teammate by developing a background animation for the team page of the new LGND website, which we hope to launch in the next couple of weeks. The design called for animating triangle shapes in the background behind a listing of our team members. I have wanted to try out a particle library. I did some research and decided to use tsParticles.

The documentation was not clear and easy to navigate as I would have liked. But I was able to piece together what I needed to know by supplementing the documentation with several other articles/tutorials that I found.

The hardest part was figuring out all the different option choices. It took me a bit to know what to look for in the documentation. I also had some trouble figuring out how to contain the animation canvas inside the parent container but I was able to find the option to achieve that.

I enjoyed playing around and trying different things before settling on a solution that I was happy with.

Caught my eye

On Thursday, I was browsing through the GSAP Showcase when I came across Drive Capital. I really liked the more subtle animations on this site. It did not feel as overdone as some other sites I looked at.

I particularly liked the way that the text was highlighted as you scrolled down the page on the Our Story page. I saw that they made use of the ScrollSmoother plugin, which I was recently playing around with.

There are some details on the site that I am not a big fan of. I was not a big fan of the really big text indents in places, and some elements could have used a little more polish. I was also disappointed that they don’t make use of the prefers-reduced-motion media query for accessibility. That is one of my complaints about animation showcases like this and codrops collective is that they feature sites that should take a more responsible stance to reduce motion for those who do not prefer it.

But overall, I liked the site and was a big fan of keeping the animations more subtle.

Articles I read

What I am reading

What I watched

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