April has proven to be a somewhat hectic month for me. Been working on a myriad of little projects and have a few bigger ones in the very immediate future. Juggling a million little tasks can prove to be quite problematic.

I helped finish off some of the details for Thriftway's April Fools emails, adding information to a design that Will produced, and later modifying it to ensure everyone knew it was an April Fools. I also had to look into some bugs in the Thriftway site caused by the front page advert rotator that is handled by jQuery. When I attached an extra style to the containing it caused things to break in IE6, for reasons unknown. This resulted in me adding an additional wrapping which holds the background for the panel. It irks me that such moves are necessary to make a browser happy, but I didn't code the software, just the site.

I also got to work on an e-flyer advertising flights with Continental Airlines, that went out to all of Thriftway's business partners, as well as one informing them of Thriftway's Easter opening hours, which I am rather proud of. Printed media isn't my forté so it's nice to have produced something along those lines that I like. It's also the reason that I asked Will to take one of the other projects I was asked to design, window flyers for the Thriftway office windows. Whilst it would be nice for me to have produced something so noticable to the public, I know my own strengths and limits. I'm more of a coder than a designer, especially when it comes to print. Will, by contrast, is very good with his printed media, even if he never likes anything he produces. So it'll be an opportunity for me to see how he approaches the task and hopefully to learn a thing or two from it.

I have also further refined the Thriftway flight search engine to now be much more predictive of people's input. Originally it would filter what was being typed from the start of each possible result. This would be fine if you only know the airport, but not if you were to put in the airport code, as it would result in no results being displayed at all. This has now been resolved using a jQuery plugin that searches using regular expressions, matching what is types to any part of the available results.

Finally I have  been doing some work on the way that the flight search functions upon a user hitting the Search button. Now, in addition to displaying the results on the screen, the search box is pre-populated with the visitor's search criteria, making it easier for them to change their search criteria, should they need to.

In the future it looks like I will be helping to design a Wordpress based Artsekta website, as well as helping with the design of the Thriftway Consol website. Plenty to be keeping me busy.

Posted by Wulf on April 10, 2009, 9:13 am