The real*adventures of
Sean McCambridge, who
Say Hello »*May be greatly exaggerated, entirely ficticious or written awkwardly in third person.
I work both directly with clients and with interactive agencies. As a contractor, I specialize in front-end development: building layouts with HTML and CSS and writing kick-ass JavaScript. With clients, I fill the whole spectrum, from planning and design to full-stack development and long-term, post-launch strategy.
I'm passionate about good design. I know my way around the Adobe Suite. I'm outspoken about usability. I contribute to the entire project, from ideation to launch. I've designed and built many sites from start to finish. But rather than always going it alone, I like to work closely with an inspired creative team.
I like to collaborate. I like working closely with information architects and designers. Together, a good designer and good developer can work out better solutions to design problems than either could alone. — Need a creative developer? Get in touch »
Subaru was about to unveil their BRZ concept at the L.A. Auto Show in 2011. It was Subaru's first two-wheel-drive car — and it was fast! Under a tight deadline, Sean led the development effort and collaborated remotely with a designer in California. Inspired by The Art of Flight snowboarding website, they designed and built an award-winning two-dimensional parallax scroller that zooms the user over a stark, racy background image with copy and beautiful shots of the BRZ concept sliding across the page to provide a real sense of smooth, tight-handling speed.
View the Subaru BRZ concept microsite »
Back at Agency.com/Designory, Sean and the Case IH team wanted to help the agricultural equipment manufacturer kill two birds with one stone: social engagement and SEO. Their solution was to give Case IH a platform to publish blog posts without the pain of enterprise CMS platforms. While the Case IH website is built within the rigid confines of SharePoint, Sean created a custom WordPress theme for their Be Ready blog incorporating responsive design. The open-source blogging platform has been serving posts related to the sustainability and future concerns of the agriculture industry since early 2011.
Check out the Case IH Be Ready blog »
While an employee at Designory, Sean was tasked as the tech lead on the Designory site redesign. Previously, Designory showcased a Flash site and suffered from a lack of visibility in search engines and non-Flash devices. Collaborating with the creative team, Sean built a boundary-pushing, award-winning site incorporating both responsive design and an extremely fluid and scalable layout, similar to Sean's current website (which benefits from heavier use of CSS and less reliance on JavaScript).
Visit Designory.com »
Tubular is a jQuery plugin that injects a YouTube video into a web page as a full-screen, resizable background with just a few lines of code. Job-hunting in Chicago in 2010, Sean noticed a trend of agencies using full-screen video backgrounds on their sites. Tubular seemed like a straightforward idea that could help designers and novice developers achieve the same effect. Originally hesitant and wondering what kind of plague he might be releasing upon the web-design world, Sean is happy to report that the Internets still have not been broken as a result of his plugin.
Check out Tubular, an adventurous jQuery plugin »
Traditional boats have been a part of Sean's life since middle school when he first visited his brother, then a schooner captain, in Bar Harbor, Maine. The two brothers built several boats together. They still share a passion for boats and the sea. Recently, Sean made a habit of finding interesting boats for sale on the web and emailing links to his brother. Finally, he realized it would make sense to record his findings in a WordPress blog to share with other potential boat lovers. BoatsILike.com is built using responsive design and the ‘Pinterest-style’ jQuery Masonry plugin.
See some of the boats Sean likes »
Photography — true to the word's root — really is writing with light. A wink of a shutter flashes light through a tiny hole onto film or digital CCD leaving a photograph, a light-stamped imprint of a moment in time. How cool is that? Sean is interested in documenting place and experience. These are some recent shots focusing on his hometown, Charleston, South Carolina.
Start slideshow »
In my downtime, I enjoy learning, scheming and tinkering. Even though MapBox wasn’t even on my list of things to look at, a couple of tangents later I was looking at a full-screen map in Jekyll. A name, a domain and a day of coding later: Grub Globe. Two weeks ago, I moved home to Charleston, SC, a great food city. I had been visiting a lot over the past year or so and had...
I was just lamenting how silly it is that I have a six-month-old blog with exactly three posts. I want to write. I like to write. I have 12 thoughts per second bouncing around my skull like pinballs. So why am I not I writing, damnit? I rebuilt this site over the winter using Jekyll. It was my first try at Jekyll for anything at all. It’s so simple. Jekyll isn’t really a CMS so...
I was working on a client project. Her site has a couple of YouTube embeds, which were working fine this morning. Suddenly, as I sit down after dinner to work on her project, there are blank spaces where the videos should be. I inspect the iframe in Firebug, and the iframes are there. But they’re empty. The <head> and <body> tags inside the iframes are void of content. My iPhone debugger took it a step...
