May 11, 2004

Sideshow Lives!

Sideshow

Behold! A new day brings a new website for you to munch on with your morning crumpets! I give you Sideshow.

“What is this?” you might ask, coffee dribbling down your chin. Well, what you see before you is the culmination of years, yes years, of work. Now you may be saying, “Years? S’ok… I guess”. Until now, Sideshow has been the on again, off again, started, then stopped birth child of the creative department where I maintain employ, TMX. It has taken many (many) forms over the years (most before I even started here), but none have ever seen the light of day. The main goal of the site was to give us a place to fool around, post junk we like, and experiment, especially those poor souls in our department without sites of their own.

So, this is the semi-scaled down version that may actually be maintainable by us! Seek and you will find: an area where we will post some of the jobs we do here at TMX, a News area sporting disembodied heads of your favorite TMX employees, an art section updated (hopefully) every week with fantastical voting functionality, and last, but certainly not least, a beautifully animated masthead.

I am so relieved the site has gone live, it has been quite a long process. Send your love and thanks to Kevin for the illustrations and animation, Terry Wall for the dynamic back-end mastery and wonderful flash integration, and er… me, for the luscious design. I realize it isn’t teeming with content yet, but it will be in the coming weeks. We hope you enjoy, please come back often.

Commentary (11):

1. Todd says… may 11, 2004 | 10:02 am

Wow. Wow!

I really dig it, extremely nice work. I think this will be going into my “Regular Reads” very soon.

The movement on mouseover in the header is a great touch.

2. Peter Santa Maria says… may 11, 2004 | 10:15 am

That site looks GREAT! So, your workplace is gving
you guys a place to display your freelance work? Kevin
can do no wrong, everything that guy does looks
amazing!

3. Jocke says… may 11, 2004 | 10:29 am

It’s really striking that site of yours and I like it. But I don’t get it why you place important content inside scrollboxes.

4. Jason Santa Maria says… may 11, 2004 | 10:33 am

Well, the cold hard truth of the matter, like any project that you don’t have complete creative control over, is that you are subject to the culmination of everyone’s opinions. Therefore, it was agreed upon for it to be a scrolling box. I would have done it differently if I had free reign, but that awful Kevin is difficult. :D

5. Rob Weychert says… may 11, 2004 | 8:36 pm

Yes yes, well done indeed. If I get a computer, I will look forward to contributing.

6. jody says… may 12, 2004 | 9:38 am

Shweeeet work! Dig it. You should almost bundle it and offer it to other creative teams as part of their intranet.

7. jacques says… may 13, 2004 | 4:56 pm

I’m thoroughly impressed.

I have to admit that I was misled by the ‘rating’ system and mistook it for a click-on-the-mallet-and-hold thing. So I think I voted a 5 or 6 on accident for a few of them. Once I figured it out though I voted up a bit :)

Btw, what typeface is used for the main header? It’s fantastically fresh & Vaudvillian.

8. Anton says… may 13, 2004 | 10:46 pm

Fine work there, senior JSM. I’ll keep my eye on it.
Hard to go wrong with classic-circus stuff. :)

9. bearskinrug says… may 14, 2004 | 8:35 am

jacques - It’s good to hear some input on the rating system. Any suggestions for making things more apparent?

The banner typeface is based on “Classic Caps” from Letterhead Fonts. The text in the signs is actually a mutation of an Art Nouveau font called Birmingham (at least that’s what it’s called on the PC).

10. jacques says… may 14, 2004 | 5:21 pm

The only real thing that comes to mind would be to add a slight cue on the meter itself, such
as highlighting the score marker lines.

But most likely it was just my mad dash to interact that prevented me from looking close enough at How Things Work. I tend to have a desire to just click on things — particularly after feeding the fire & chickens to mr. bear for hours on end.

11. bearskinrug says… may 14, 2004 | 5:25 pm

hehehe

I hear that…