I’m Cyd, a contract inventive developer, tech speaker and part-time trainer primarily based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. I construct accessible, award-winning web sites for corporations, studios and people, however I additionally educate the following technology of net builders on the Amsterdam College of Utilized Sciences (AUAS). I prefer to weblog now and again, and I’ve actually loved talking at conferences over time.
What I like most about improvement is seeing flat designs come alive with movement and utilizing it as a storytelling device.
Chosen work
Rotgans Media Home
Michiel Rotgans is a Dutch photographer with stunning work. It’s at all times simpler to create portfolios for folks with gorgeous visuals.
I particularly love the homepage-to-case transition and the way it performs in reverse when navigating again.
This challenge was designed by Tim Borst. On this challenge I used CSS view transitions for filtering, web page transitions, and load-more animations. I additionally used CSS anchor positioning for a small micro-interaction on the filter buttons. It’s in-built WordPress utilizing Swup with native view transitions. Swup is wonderful if you wish to have management over your completely different transitions between pages, a lot simpler and higher supported than the native approaches with view transition varieties and pageswap occasions in the meanwhile.
Studio Sallali
Hamid Sallali is a inventive director who I’ve labored with a number of instances over time. He designed this web site and gave me full inventive management over the movement.
The scroll animation (achieved with GSAP ScrollTrigger) was primarily based on a tutorial proper right here on Codrops. This was all earlier than view transitions, so the press animation on the instances is completed with GSAP Flip. That is additionally a WordPress web site.
De Visdeurbel
De Visdeurbel (or fish doorbell) is a challenge from Dutch ecologist Mark van Heukelum. He observed that numerous fish have been being blocked mid-migration by a lock in Utrecht, the Netherlands. He positioned an underwater digicam on the lock, had a web site made that confirmed the livestream and a doorbell that customers might press each time a fish was seen. Within the first years an e mail was really despatched to the lockkeeper with a screenshot of the livestream so he might come and manually open the lock. With over 250,000 presses a 12 months, we finally needed to construct one thing just a little extra subtle than emailing a lockkeeper.
Not essentially the most inventive web site by way of movement, however considered one of my favorite tasks nonetheless, due to the neighborhood it created. Tens of millions of tourists watch a stream of just a little lock in Utrecht yearly.
De Visdeurbel was additionally featured on Final Week Tonight with John Oliver, which was actually surreal.
It was redesigned by considered one of my favorite studios to work with, Studio Moan, final 12 months and I dealt with the rebuild.
After solely two days we realised simply how many individuals have been visiting De Visdeurbel, and the way many individuals simply preferred to press a button (and truthfully, who can blame them?). It pressured me to consider methods to scale back the quantity of empty screenshots, which I dropped at the Okay Dev Slack, a neighborhood stuffed with a number of the most useful inventive devs you will discover. I landed on implementing some edge detecting type of algorithm and wrote a weblog publish about it.
This 12 months we’re additionally accumulating extra knowledge on how the fish doorbell is used, my college students from the Minor Net Improvement are literally exploring what we might do with that knowledge as we converse. Keep tuned!
Sophie Zwartkruis
Sophie Zwartkruis is a company governance advisor. She needed a minimalistic web site with web page transitions and delicate scroll animations. It’s generally tougher to go small than massive, but it surely was a very pleasing challenge.
This web site was designed by Hamid Sallali. He created a fundamental palette of complementary colors, added a particular {and professional} serif font, and requested me to usher in delicate animations to create an expert web site that invitations you to maintain exploring.
About me
I studied Communication and Multimedia Design at AUAS, and I used to be totally planning to turn out to be a designer. In the course of the tech programs, nevertheless, I realised how enjoyable coding might be. Sadly for me, that didn’t imply I used to be instantly good at it, however with a lot of hours of arduous work and after a Minor in Net Design and Improvement I grew to become so much higher.
In my last 12 months on the uni I acquired a frontend internship at Matise, a small digital company in Amsterdam. That’s additionally the place I first encountered design and animation as storytelling instruments. I used to be supplied a job after graduating in 2018 and labored there till 2020, when Matise closed their doorways. After that, I began freelancing.
After bumping into a few of my former lecturers at a convention in 2022, I used to be invited to affix them as a trainer on the model new two-year Affiliate Diploma Frontend Design & Improvement at AUAS.
In 2024 I spoke at a convention for the primary time, the Awwwards convention in Valencia, and since I’ve spoken at a few of my favorite occasions about CSS and inventive improvement, like Past Tellerrand, CSS Day and JS Heroes. I’ve a number of extra talking engagements on the calendar for this 12 months, together with Fronteers Darkish mode.
Philosophy
I’m a giant believer in “underpromise, overdeliver”. I believe that’s why most of my new tasks come from referrals. I additionally consider that accessibility could be a possibility to be extra inventive and get extra tasks. It’s nonetheless fairly area of interest for inventive builders to know something about accessibility, sadly, however with new laws within the EU it’s changing into increasingly necessary.
I believe it’s actually necessary to maintain up with new specs, CSS has added numerous cool new options to exchange JavaScript, like sibling index, anchor positioning, view transitions and scroll-driven animations. I attempt to implement these in new tasks as enhancements the place doable, however I at all times strive them out in my portfolio first. Constructing portfolios has turn out to be a type of escalated interest of mine, I mainly construct a brand new portfolio yearly.
Instruments & workflow
Whereas I’ve in-built just about each fashionable framework, I construct a lot of the web sites for my very own shoppers in WordPress. I do know it doesn’t sound fancy, but it surely’s essentially the most cost-effective and user-friendly possibility for me and my shoppers.
I do actually get pleasure from utilizing SvelteKit and Astro, and I usually attain for these if I don’t want a CMS. I like these frameworks particularly as a result of they keep near vanilla JavaScript, though SvelteKit has added numerous complexity over the previous couple of years.
Presently studying
Currently I’ve been making an attempt to exchange numerous JavaScript animation with CSS options. Again in 2024 I felt I actually wanted to hurry out my new portfolio for that 12 months as a result of I used to be certain everybody would get onto the bandwagon of view transitions and scroll-driven animation and that my portfolio wouldn’t be particular anymore. Two years later, nevertheless, it looks like the Inventive JavaScript Developer crowd remains to be very a lot in JS land. Baseline help for the options has additionally taken longer than I anticipated, so that may have one thing to do with it. I nonetheless suppose CSS animations will take over increasingly JavaScript animations as browser help grows, so it’s undoubtedly well worth the time funding.
Present challenges
My greatest problem at present is balancing all of the issues I need to do directly: instructing, talking at conferences and really constructing issues for shoppers. I’ll take a little bit of day without work from instructing for a minimum of the following semester to get a more healthy work-life steadiness.
Ultimate ideas
It’s a bizarre time to be an internet developer, to say it mildly, with folks saying it’s now not price your time to be taught new specs as a result of AI will take over most of our work anyway. Some corporations are even forcing their builders into changing into ‘immediate engineers’.
I believe it’s necessary to take a step again, keep resilient, and realise the mud hasn’t settled but, we’re on the very begin of AI. Our roles as builders will most likely change, however how precisely isn’t clear but.
The most certainly situation, in my eyes, will likely be that we as builders will likely be increasingly pushed into a task of being arbiters of style, high quality and safety. It is going to be increasingly necessary to give attention to the fundamentals of net improvement; realizing the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘dangerous’ code, implementing ideas like DRY and maintaining a tally of efficiency, progressive enhancement and accessibility.
I believe our relevance and energy in comparison with AI will likely be in seeing the total context of the work, who will use it, how they are going to use it and why. So my recommendation is: spend a while within the subsequent couple of months to relearn the fundamentals.
