The real*adventures of
Sean McCambridge, who
Say Hello »*May be greatly exaggerated, entirely ficticious or written awkwardly in third person.
A dash of artist, a pinch of geek, Sean's diverse influences led him early on to follow the line between the creative and the technical. In 1999 with the emerging popularity of the web, Sean began teaching himself web design in his spare time. Today, it's his craft. He builds web apps with MVC frameworks in PHP and Ruby, and works with CMS-powered sites using WordPress and ExpressionEngine. But Sean's focus is the front end, working closely with design, building with HTML5, CSS3 and modern JavaScript frameworks.
Sean is passionate about good design. He knows his way around the Adobe Suite. He is outspoken about usability. He contributes to the ideation phase of projects. He has designed and built many websites (including this one) from start to finish. But rather than going it alone, Sean prefers working closely with a standout creative team.
Sean likes to collaborate. He enjoys 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 »
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...
This website is deceptively awesome. Now that SeanMcCambridge.com cir. 2013 is up and a blog running, I get to talk a little bit about the construction of the site. And I’m excited to share. I’ve never seen this technique used before (though I imagine it’s out there somewhere). At the very least, it’s new to me, and I think it will be useful for any kind of layout. I found a way to create a...
Ringing in the new year with a new website! This is the third version of SeanMcCambridge.com. Version 2 was up for about a year, but it was more of a placeholder than anything. As of today, this site is still a work-in-progress, but it’s pretty well developed already and, perhaps more importantly, shows a whole lot more personality. I’ll write more about the details of how the site is put together soon — I’m using...
