SitePoint is an online media company specializing in news geared toward software developers and other flavors of geek. As is somewhat common in these circles, they afford their staff a few days on occasion to work on personal projects on company time. Why would a company do this? So their employees are empowered to create something like Launchable, which is actually a rather interesting crowdfunding experiment.
CSS is the language of the web that adds color and style to the page, and over time it has become increasingly robust to the point where you can now animate elements of the page with it. Alex Walker is a designer at SitePoint and wanted to run an experiment. He believes CSS animation is an underutilized aspect of the language and wants to teach a class. Why not use crowdfunding to mitigate the risk of setting the class up by preselling seats? Better yet, why not roll his own crowdfunding solution to facilitate everything?
Launchable was born. More on the course…
So what are we going to cover? We’re going to make sure you’ve got the perfect primer on the syntax on how to get going. If you’ve only done a little bit of CSS animation we’ll make sure that’s covered early on. We’re also going to cover preprocessors and in particular SASS and the Bourbon library, because once you start to get complicated with this stuff it’s almost impossible to do without some help from these tools. We’re going to cover Sprite animation with CSS, which a lot of people don’t know that you can do. We’ll be using blur and shadow effects and animating those on the fly to create fog and smoke like effects that don’t seem possible with CSS until you see them done. We’ll be using Cicada like time signatures on our animations, instead of using space as a way of using numbers to get interesting effects, we’ll be using time to get organic feeling animations that don’t feel like they’re being run on a timeline. By using the techniques I outline in this course, you will be well on your way to creating great CSS3 animations just like those I created for the SitePoint Story of Christmas.
It seems that SitePoint is watching reaction to this campaign to see what the response is. If response is strong this may transition into a new crowdfunding platform. So what do you think? Is this a niche that could use a new platform.
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