Red Ingot — a website design project
Eric Listenberger, the man behind Red Ingot Design Studio, is a life-long friend of mine. Our mothers sang in the church choir while we were out behind the church playing in a bog they called a lake, or giving other kids COOL LESSONS.
Now, 30 years later we've joined forces once again, but this time things are lots cooler.
Eric knew exactly what he wanted, so he put the pen to the pad and played the role of UI designer on the project. It was a challenge to meet Eric's "pixel-perfect" spec, but with careful cross-browser compatibility testing, we pulled it off nicely. (It was also great to work with a product designer, as I'm in-love with product design.)
For the Red Ingot site, I decided that JQuery would be the ideal way to display the "slideshow" of images. It's fast-loading, and more than that, it's easy to maintain. Specifically, I used the JQuery Cycle Plugin, developed by Mike Alsup and adapted from other open source code. JQuery Cycle is a brilliant script; the images are simply stacked in a div and the script hides them on page load.
The image you'll see when you first visit the site is an Envirofit Clean Cook Stove. The stove has been awarded POPULAR SCIENCE'S 100 BEST INNOVATIONS OF THE YEAR.
More than half the world’s population cooks over open fires or small charcoal or biomass stoves. These burn fuel incompletely, producing carbon monoxide and smoke that cause 1.5 million deaths a year. Envirofit’s Cookstove burns the same easily found wood but does so more completely to cut emissions by more than 80 percent and use half as much fuel. The can-shaped stove has a precisely measured opening that lets in enough air to fan the flames, yet not enough to cool it and slow down combustion. A chimney-like tube inside helps funnel in fresh air, and a ceramic lining insulates the stove to keep the fire hot and burning efficiently. From $15; envirofit.org