The challenge of this website was to find a way to showcase my ongoing experiments with JavaScript and articulate my interest in creating art that is native to the web browser.We often put pictures of art on the web, but this work is actually made of web elements and can really only exist within that medium.
The Abstract Expressionist movement, that took place in the mid-twentieth century has always been some of my favorite work. This work is partly about imagining what the likes of Kandinsky, Pollock and Motherwell would have done if they had the web in the 1950’s.This website, created in the winter of 2016 is live at http://wmmead.com/randomjs. I encourage you to check it out and explore it.
The main challenged I faced when creating this site, was finding a good way to showcase the iterative process of developing these recursive JavaScript programs. With each iteration, they become more complex and the world of their possibilities opens up a little more.I came up with the idea of actually having the program running, in its most advanced form, at the top of the page, in the header. Then each version of the experiments is outlined in small pods going across the page.
Interspersed are videos I created for viewers who are perhaps less inclined to read about the process and the development, but all the content is available and easy to explore.
As an added way of interacting with the content, I came up with the innovative idea of putting a clickable arrow at the bottom right of the header and animating the size of the header to fit the size of the browser window, allowing the viewer to get a fuller picture of the program in its creation process.
Another challenge I set myself, was to use native JavaScript only. It is easy to become reliant on libraries like jQuery and others, and I wanted to stay away from those and hone my JavaScripting skills.Then when it came time to add this contact form at the end of the project, I was loath to add jQuery just to do a simple AJAX form submission, so I modified my own native AJAX engine and built in some custom JavaScript validation that gives this site a little extra unique flare. Its the kind of small thing I get really excited about.
Each pod on the front page leads to a sub page that goes into detail about that particular version of the program, which is also running in the header, to keep consistency with the front page.I used my own custom built snippet generator to display pieces of code that are unique to this specific iteration of the program and help describe my thought process as the project becomes bigger and more complex.
This site shows some of my front-end design and development work and shows how I use these projects to teach students about those same topics.
I am particularly good at bending CSS to do my bidding, and I really enjoy creating custom interactivity with JavaScript. I am always excited about new problems that need to be tackled.
