Climate & Us
Front-end Build
Climate & Us is a programme to encourage everyone to think about what climate change means now and in the future. I developed the front-end with one other front-end developer, based on provided wireframes and PSDs.
Details
| Client | EDF Energy |
|---|---|
| Year | 2014 |
| Duration | 2 months |
| Tools & Tech | HTML, CSS, Sass, jQuery |
| Output | Fully functioning templates |
| URL | climateandus.com |
Summary
This was an interesting project that aimed to raise the bar visually, using tilt-shift photography and parallax scrolling to create more attention grabbing headers. I was wary of implementing some of the intended features, being well aware of the resulting performance issues. After some initial experimentation with a complex scrolling homepage, we rightly decided to remove these effects as they were distracting and made the site more confusing to use.
I worked closely with a second front-end developer to build the framework for the site. A core part of the site is the news area that uses small tiles in various colour schemes and arrangements. We built a flexible grid that could be pushed and pulled in different combinations, and added the Masonry JavaScript library to allow the grid to adapt to different screens.
The initial front-end build was designed for larger screens, and so was constrained in a fixed-width container. However, we knew that phase 2 of the project would be to make it responsive, so all the coding decisions for internal layouts were built with future flexibility in mind.
As the project progressed, many of the original features were simplified further or dropped completely, so some of the most interesting things we built didn’t get used. This is always a little disappointing, but these were the right decisions to make and resulted in a more focused user experience.
