Ai Welcomes Many Little Visitors
Being a web designer at Ai brings many interesting things to my plate. Today, for example, I stuck superhero bodies on 17 kindergartners’ heads.
Let me explain. Our president, Alex, volunteered to have his son’s class come for a visit to see the company and what we do. The agenda for the day was to teach the kids how a website is made, have some snacks and pizza, and partake in a couple of creative activities, which would lead to their very own website.
The excited and curious children kids settled in the conference room with hot chocolate and heard a brief introduction about websites in general and clients. Then they were taken on a tour through the office, to learn how a website is made with quick stops at the desks of people from each department.
Then it was website making time. We had them draw their own postage stamp designs on a piece of paper that could be sold on a website. After they were done, I came in to show them the “ecommerce” website I had designed for them that would soon showcase their art. Everything was in place in my Photoshop file except for one thing, which I needed their help to finish. On the homepage were 3 rows of kids’ heads (which I had cut out from their school pictures) floating in space without bodies. We had an assortment of bodies for them to choose from to attach to their heads. We had Batman, Cinderella, The Hulk, Snow White, Spiderman, and others. Excitement filled the room and “OMG! That’s me!” was screamed about 20 times before the teacher had to calm everyone down. The kids picked their new bodies, I dragged the bodies to their heads, and the new image was uploaded to our server.
Nick, our front-end engineer, then showed how the HTML can be changed and modified. Using Firefox’s plugin, Firebug, he showed the kids how it’s possible to change text colors, font sizes and background colors very easily. When Nick finished, the stamps had been scanned and uploaded behind the scenes and were live for Nick to show them in the gallery. The website also featured video clips from the day that we had taken during the activities, including an inspiring performance of the kids’ school song.
The day took a lot of planning and was executed perfectly by all involved. The results: Some very happy kids and pizza for all–including a pleased but exhausted Ai team.