As the lead front end developer, I was responsible for working closely with the designers at Fantasy in San Francisco to deliver a truly bespoke site whilst following a very detailed set of UX guidelines. A pure collaborative project, the build was carried out alongside design to facilitate the best blend of digital design and latest development technologies. To aid the project, the team worked using a 'War Room' whereby core members sat together for the duration.

The design was broken down into customisable modules and components to allow for a complex visual layout that would work across multiple resolutions. HTML5 and CSS3 features were utilised to enrich the site for modern browsers while ensuring a good experience for those with older browsers.

A development first, the site integrated a style guide and component toolkit into the build which allowed QA to start as soon as a module was ready, opposed to waiting for an entire page. I lead an agnostic build approach to the modules so they could be placed anywhere within custom page templates rather than fixed content types.

Due to the multiple Latin, Asian and Cyrillic character support I used another new development in custom fonts which using Unicode range setting for specific characters, specifically the Latin characters in the brand name 'Wacom' which required the brand's Latin font type across all languages.

The result was a cutting edge site with a bespoke CMS and backend written in Django providing Fantasy the tools to build new and exciting pages and Wacom the control they wanted over regional and country specific products with the ability to update the site with regular local content.

Tech Stack

• HTML5/CSS3
• Javascript/Backbone
• Font Icons
• Unicode Subsetting
• Responsive
• Canvas
• CSS Animations
• CoffeeScript