Edible People
Disney Rain Ponchos
A series of rain ponchos designed for making rainy days at the Disney parks more magical.
Neighborhood Website
After connecting the residents of my neighborhood via Nextdoor (basically an online social network for neighborhoods), I decided to create an informational website about the neighborhood.
It’s my hope that the website will instill pride in the neighborhood and also impress potential buyers looking to move into the area. I really love the neighborhood, and I built the site to help it flourish.
The website is built on Bootstrap. I also had fun digging into the Google Maps API for this one.
Visit the site: windwoodnorth.com
Screenshots
Smilin’ SMIL Animation
If you came in through the front door of this site, you’ve already met my alter-ego, Smilin’ Chad. The animation was created using a combination of SVG graphics, SMIL animation, and jQuery.
Looks like this isn’t supported here. :(
Believe it or not, I searched for how to do this type of animation but couldn’t find anything like it on the whole entire web. So, who knows, perhaps I’m the first. And being the first, I decided to name my animation style: I call it “morphimation.” :)
What I did find in my searches were SMIL animations that morph a single path/shape (best example is this Batman logo morphimation), so I adapted that idea to animate an SVG image with many paths.
While jQuery is not really necessary for a simple morphimation like the Batman logo, my version is too complex to create all the SVG and SMIL attributes by hand. For that reason, I set it up so all I have to do is export an SVG file from my vector drawing program. Then I’m using jQuery to read in that file, parse it, create the inline SVG and its animate tags, and then populating those tags with values for each frame. Easy!
I cleaned up my code a bit and put it on Github in case anyone wanted to do something similar. I was actually going to clean it up a lot more and make it easier to reuse, but….
Well, dang it, I found out only after doing all this that SMIL is going the way of the HTML “font” tag — deprecated!! Oh noes! I don’t know how I missed this while I was working on the project, but, well, crap.
It was a good learning experience nonetheless. From what I’ve read, it doesn’t sound like there’s currently an alternative way to do this kind of animation. I’ll have to look into that further.
Oh yeah — I also added a mouse hover effect just for fun. Roll-over the animation with your mouse (sorry, no fun for touch screen users) to see what happens.
The Last Banana
The (First World) Problem
We’ve all been there. Two bananas left on the banana hanger. You pick them up, rip off one for consumption, and then try to return the last one to the hanger. Except no banana hanger in the world can hang a single banana. You try to wedge it into the hook. You try to balance it on the top. No luck. Eventually, you give up and toss the banana on the counter.
Boom. Bruised banana. Thus is the fate of the last banana.
The (Revolutionary) Solution
This is the problem I attempted to solve as I stepped into the role of product developer. I came up with an elegantly simple solution — my design includes a notch into which a single banana stem can be easily wedged.
Though this whole idea started out as a joke (see my infomercial screenplay below), I actually put serious thought and effort into the designs and then registered for a provisional patent. I then put up a sell-sheet in the form of a website (linked below) which I could use to shop the idea around to various kitchen product manufacturers. I shopped it around, though no one was ultimately interested in licensing the idea. As usual, I’m so far ahead of my time that others cannot see my genius. ;)
Despite the idea not selling, it was a fun and educational experience.
Website Sell-Sheet
Link: The Last Banana
I put together a single-page site to show off the idea to kitchen product companies.
The Infomercial
This whole thing started as a joke. I even wrote a screenplay for a comical infomercial. After writing it, I thought that, though goofy, this could legitimately catch on and sell some product. I never did get around to actually producing the video, though, so let me know if you’re interested in working on this together. :)
Note: The screenplay was written back when the banana hanger was intended as an adapter rather than a stand-along solution. My, how far we’ve come since then! ;)
Hidden Figure Drawings
You’ve heard of “hidden Mickeys?” Well, this is kinda like that. Sometimes I see figures or faces or monsters in everyday objects and want to bring them to life. No, it’s not a psychosis; rather, I like to think of it as creativity. I won’t tell you my shrink’s opinion on the matter.
Some of these figures are, I think, fairly obvious once I point them out. Others, well, perhaps not so much. Below are a couple examples of figures that I decided to breathe life into.
Papel
I found this little guy lurking in the wallpaper of my father-in-law’s bathroom. As you can see from the wallpaper photo below, he didn’t need too much creative translation to turn him into Papel, Spirit of the Bathroom.
Tile Monster
What does it say that both these examples were found in bathrooms? Hmm…
Anyway, I found this mischievous fellow lurking in the tile of my own bathroom shower. After seeing him there for some months, I decided it was time to let him out as well.
