After a decade of Stresslimit Design, I have decided to move on to other things. There is no easy way to say how major a shift this is for me, so better to say it quickly, then add elaborate.
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We’re proud to have helped Jason Bodkin and Montreal’s collaborative drawing project En Masse redo their website recently. Wes really took the lead in setting up the information structure first, then iterating the design with the help of CelineCelines’ design eye. This was an experiment in live-wireframing, and the experiment was definitely as success. It is still a work in progress, but we’re happy to show the results and so are En Masse.
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We’re at the Mozilla Festival in London! As part of the session we are leading about Building Books for the Open Web, we are going to drink our own kool-aid and make a book using PressBooks about the conference and topics and themes discussed here. There are already so many interesting people around doing great projects here and in the rest of their lives, that we’re super excited to document and continue to discuss.
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We do so much work for clients abroad (either in different countries or different continents), so we always love when we get the chance to meet face to face. We were therefore very excited to be able to go down to Washington D.C. to attend the Beyond Access 2012 Conference Local Alternatives for Global Development: Rediscovering Libraries on October 3rd, put on by our client Beyond Access. In partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the conference aims to explore the “how” of information access, bringing public libraries into discussions of development for the first time. This year, 20 library delegations from every continent were in attendance, presenting their innovative community ideas to over 300 participants.
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As Stresslimit evolves, we’ve realized that our current web presence isn’t quite doing is for us anymore. So we’re adapting it to better reflect where we are today, and where we’re headed. With a parallel approach to content, identity and technical development, we’re reworking our messaging, information architecture and design. As each member of the team brings their background and perspective to the table (we are literally all working around the same table), we hash out ideas and challenge possible directions.
Continue ReadingAre you experiencing unexpectedly slow, weird, or inefficient animations? I was trying to get Javascript to animate something smoothly over 1000ms, but it just wasn’t working. It was jerky and slow. After pulling my hair out for a bit, I realized I had this defined in my CSS:
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We are very happy to announce another example of what we love about “beauty in simplicity”, our latest site in collaboration with Marc Kandalaft design [logo design], Florin Gabor studio [web design], the Stresslimit team [conception, UI/UX, information architecture, content development, production/programming and project management], and of course a wonderful client Mike Pickering and his team at Best Practice Learning Solutions.
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I was recently reminded by @jkudish that it’s time to start thinking [well ahead] about WordCamp Montreal in August, and since we sponsored and spoke last year I’d love to do both again. Checking out the WordCamp Montreal apply to speak page, I see myself and Joey giving our talk about custom content types, plus a cameo by WCMTL organizer Jeremy Clark [sitting down at left].
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We love awesome, bold messaging in a slick and impressive design, especially if it adapts smartly and looks great on screens from massive to mini [ie. mobile]. That’s exactly why we love the site recently launched by Montréal creative marketing agency N/A Creative, a collaboration between Stresslimit [UX/architecture/tech], Triboro Design [visual design], and of course N/A themselves providing content, structure and direction as the site is about them after all.
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I was recently tasked to implement a site where the home page had a series of rotating full-screen backgrounds. The quintessential example that immediately sprang to mind was the GoToChina site, while Chris Coyer has a series of techniques he’s rounded up, too. However, these utilize only a single image.
Continue ReadingWe are proud to announce and show off our temporary Stresslimit headquarters in the Middle East here in Beirut, at Beirut’s media lab & collaborative space Karaj Beirut [كراج بيروت]. We met the team here through our friend and artist-entrepreneur Ayah Bdeir founder of the space. It’s in a heritage building in classic Ottoman style, with a number of rooms giving onto a central meeting space [shown here], and also has a kitchen and garden. I mostly take meetings from here on Skype but would be great to host in-person meetings as well! We hope this pieds-à-terre will open doors for future business in the MENA region.
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We have recently had the pleasure of working with the good folks at the Canadian Digital Media Network, helping them build their site relaunch at CDMN.ca. All of us here at Stresslimit [especially Wes, Miette, Céline and myself who worked on the project] send out a big thanks and congrats to Tony, Todd and the team at CDMN, and Roy and his design team at Rival Schools design for making it look great.
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The dilemma… one of our designers recently presented me with this:
Continue ReadingI’m just in the final throes of completing a site, and it feels great. However, I recently took a moment to survey the bulk of the code I had generated, and I reflected upon the avenues for improvement and refinement. While such a thing is probably not wise immediately prior to signing off on something (as it could potentially lead to untimely code refactoring), I did identify a number of redundancies in my CSS that I thought could be easily cleaned up.
Continue ReadingWe are very fortunate to be hosting an electronics workshop in our studio (a.k.a. the Woodshop). I’ll be running things, while tech whiz Adam Brown will be providing the technical expertise. We’re going to be doing basic soldering techniques as well as showing how to read / understand simple circuitry diagrams. And, to what end? Well, so that participants may assemble their very own futuristic light-controlled frequency oscillator. From the future.
Continue ReadingLots has happened to the extended Stresslimit family in 2011, and I’m not going to try to summarize but I wanted to share a few thoughts and pictures here. A lot of what we do involves sitting at a laptop clicking & typing away, which is not very photogenic, but I’ve pulled out a few image-worthy moments.
Continue ReadingI can hardly believe it has been already ONE year since the last Creative Commons Salon in Montreal, on Dec. 21st 2010! ONE YEAR!! So much has happened since then, but unfortunately so little in terms of collecting, organizing, and archiving the content that was produced and presented then… I have uploaded all images captured of the event by my friend Marie-Julie Garneau. That is a first step. I will later on upload all power-point presentations to a CCMTL slideshare and share them. Also we have everything on tape! All the footage from all the talks that I’d love some help to digitalize / edit them, so ping me if interested!
Continue ReadingHere’s a nifty trick to impress your geek friends at nerd school: encode your icons as base64 data and save them right inside your stylesheet.
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Well, always one to give credit where credit’s due, I must say that I just spent 20 minutes geeking out over some of the CSS found at Sorenson media’s nice site. Specifically, I am quite impressed with the particular usage of the ::before and ::after pseudoelements to create a subtle curled shadow underneath an element. (I should say I’ve since seen this technique in a few places, so I’m not sure who deserves the original credit for it).
Continue ReadingI love this stuff—hearing back from the “real world” about things that we’ve made for our clients.
Continue ReadingWe’re shaking things up here at StressLimit. Taking stock. Looking in, looking around, looking forward. Colin recently had coffee with Julien Smith, a long-time time friend and client, who referred to [or coined] the term “Free Agency” as a way to describe the way we’re thinking and the changes we’re exploring.
Continue ReadingI can say with certainty that we have officially “moved.” Quotation marks here indicate doubt as to the termination of this task. Although all important things of the office were moved [tables & chairs, server, phone and other technology boxes], there was still plumbing and painting being done]. This means that the foosball table that has been waiting here for a couple weeks still doesn’t have a proper horizontal home. Soon though we will hear the happy orchestra of fingers tapping, computer fans whirring and foosballs banging, all very productive sounds!
Continue ReadingFor the past 5 years [since late 2006], Stresslimit design has been based out of a beautiful century triplex in east Montréal, in the Hochelaga district—known for biker gang wars in the 80’s and 90’s, now better known for … well … not much actually! We’ve always enjoyed the humble surroundings which allowed us to concentrate on our work while keeping a “low profile.”
Continue ReadingAfter almost 10 years of creating amazing things for amazing people, after some major restructuring, and hot on the heels of a bunch of sprints including helping TechCrunch launch their ambitious redesign, Stresslimit will be [mostly] on sabbatical for the month of August 2011.
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