HTML/CSS Web Design/Development Position (UPDATED)

UPDATE: We’re set for this position now – thanks.

My second home and second family, silverorange, is looking for a talented and motivated person proficient with HTML, CSS, and the general tools of web design.

  • A deep understanding of effective, attractive, usable, and standards-based HTML/CSS-based design and layout is required.
  • The position is full-time but temporary (June through December) and dedicated to a particular client.
  • Location is not an issue, but being within the North American time-zones would help.
  • A demonstrable body of work is a requirement – we can’t judge your skill-set over the phone.
  • Communication and writing abilities are key – you’ll be in frequent and direct contact with the client.

If you meet these requirements and are interested, email your information and some links to some of your work to slice@silverorange.com (no phone calls please). UPDATE: We’re set for this position now – thanks.

 

Unintended Night Lights

The following things in my house have some kind of light on all the time whether they are in use or not:

  1. Microwave
  2. Camera battery charger
  3. Laptop
  4. Phone
  5. Cell phone
  6. Baby monitor (transmitter and receiver)
  7. Smoke detector (x3)
  8. Alarm clock
  9. Cable modem
  10. Wireless router
  11. Coffee Maker!?

There is also a street light about twenty feet from my front step.

 

Feature Suggestion for YouTube: Double-Time

I think almost any video on YouTube would benefit from having a “play at double-speed” button. Who has time to watch a full 25-second video in real-time?

While I’m (mostly) joking here, this is the kind of thing you’d actually be able to do if the video weren’t in a proprietary Flash player/format – though we don’t have a standard alternative, yet.

 

“That’s one of the great contradictions of white people. For the most part, all the world’s ills are based on large, evil corporations — government corruption, American expansion through the use of corporate contracts, pollution, globalization, every bad thing that’s happened. But if it happens with nice design, it’s acceptable.” ― Christian Lander, the Stuff White People Like guy, in an interview with Salon.

 

The Long Road to Firefox 3

Mozilla Firefox logo

With the release of Firefox 3 last month, the Mozilla project, corporation, community, and the open-source software world in general have a great achievement on their collective hands.

My involvement with Mozilla began with a weblog post in October of 2003, over a year before the initial release of Firefox. During the year that led up to the release of Firefox 1.0, we assembled a team that created the branding and visual identity for Firefox (and later, Thunderbird).

As the launch of Firefox 1.0 approached, our involvement in the project grew from visual identity to include a redesign of the Mozilla.org in the summer of 2004 by our company, silverorange. This also meant a change in the nature of our involvement to include professional services. We were now making some money!

Though my involvement in Firefox was a only thin layer on top of the years of engineering, design, and development that truly built the product and organization, I’ve occasionally had some unique opportunities. On November 9th, 2004 at 4:51AM Atlantic time, I had the privilege of making the CVS-commit to the mozilla.org website that officially released Firefox 1.0.

With the release of Firefox 1.5 in November of 2005, we launched a the new Mozilla.com website (having separated the Firefox and Thunderbird products out from the larger Mozilla.org website). The release of Firefox 2, brought with it the first redesign of Mozilla.com where the visual style was provided by another design firm (NoBox) and our role was one of implementation.

With the release of Firefox 3, Mozilla.com received a major design, again with the visual style coming from another firm (The Royal Order of Experience Design from Chicago). The style of this new site is unlike anything we could have created ourselves and it made the implementation both challenging and fun.

The involvement that I and my co-workers had with Firefox and Mozilla has paralleled and contributed to the growth and success of our business. Our work with Firefox and Mozilla changed the world in which our company operated and provided a new set of extraordinary opportunities. When a guy named Kevin Rose called and asked us to help with the design of his new site, Digg, the first thing he said was that he had seen our work with Mozilla.

As the organization behind Firefox grew, and the scale and amounts of money floating around grew, I was skeptical of the long-term prospects of the project and of the product. Once Mozilla was big enough, I thought, they’d have the same problems any large software company has.

Firefox 3 has proven me wrong. I really expected Firefox to get bigger, dumber, slower, as the small founding team of developers was eclipsed by a larger team. Instead Mozilla has shown that they are not “any large software company”. Like Linux, Apache, and other great free-software projects before them, they have shown how an open-source project can defy the traditional rules of software project management. The product has gotten smaller, smarter, and faster. The organization continues to look at issues that matter for an open web.

It’s been fun. So, when does Firefox 4 come out?