Another project I worked on while an intern at ACS is creating this year's holiday greeting card the CEO, Tom Connelly, sends out to his personal network of industry members and other chemistry enterprises around the world. I started off working on the print version, as logistical factors such as cost were going to limit what designs we could use.
The Initial Four
The initial four designs for the cover are shown above. The theme that was decided upon for this year's card was the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and with the first idea, one of the design team members had an interesting idea to make a spinner that would land on one of the associated icons that symbolize each goal, which would then lead the card's recipient to engage in some sort of action helping to achieve that goal. The inside of the cover lists the 17 goals and has associated actions (not pictured but looks identical to the next design), which the recipient would match to the icon that the spinner landed on previously. With this card, the ACS executives I met with to discuss the designs and I agreed that this was a more meaningful card than a standard, flat greeting card in that it incorporates a call-to-action to be more sustainable, especially during the holiday season when more waste is generally produced (e.g., present wrappings, food waste, etc.). The second idea was essentially the same, but mimics an advent calendar in that there would be flaps with the icons that the recipient could open up to reveal the corresponding activity. Of course, cost was a concern since these two will invariably involve more work to produce, so the next two designs were fallback designs in case the first two were too cost-prohibitive. Fortunately, they weren't, so it's likely that the first one, our preferred design, will be sent out later this year.
As we all know, print is slowly dying in the modern era, so I was also tasked with developing an electronic version. Initially, I started on just creating an Outlook email template, but due to the nature of email and its lack of HTML features compared to the web, I also created a web page to which the email will provide a link.
The WebpageMy manager was pretty keen on me incorporating animations into my work, especially after seeing the error pages, so I added a few falling snowflakes to give the page a holiday vibe and made the arrow spin with CSS keyframes. In case the spinner card isn't sent out (at least with the movable spinner), this interactive version would provide a similar experience. In terms of code, the e-card relied mostly on JavaScript, as the data was stored in key-value pairs in a JavaScript object. This prevented the need to create 17 different pages and eased the process of randomly generating a certain goal and activity. Because random generation does sometimes result in the same value being generated consecutively, each portion of the SDG wheel logo is clickable and brings the visitor to the page with that goal (whose data is also injected using the JS object).
Once I completed the e-card, I thought I was done, but I was then told to test it on all browsers, including IE 11. I never bothered to test for Internet Explorer on any of my work prior to this because of how much work it entails and my lack of a PC, but I had to this time around, especially considering that the recipients of this card tend to be older (and therefore more likely to use an older browser like IE 11). It wasn't a fun experience to conduct browser testing, but I valued that it gave me a better glimpse of what this field of work involves. However, since the e-card relies on JavaScript, I wasn't able to create a no JavaScript fallback, so unfortunately, recipients that don't have it enabled won't be getting the same experience, so that's one area of improvement. Regardless, I'm pretty satisfied with this project overall, especially the e-card.