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- 2022-2023 recap + latest code experiment
2022-2023 recap + latest code experiment
Niven Ranchhod
January 24, 2023
👋🏾 Hey friends,
Really appreciate you all joining me on this journey to experiment with and push the boundaries of email design & development.
I'm still trying to find a comfortable routine to work on Bare Bones experiments. I've got a lot going on work wise and in my personal life, so these experiments and the newsletter often get pushed aside. And that's a good thing!
This is my hobby and I'm passionate about it. In turn it acts as a cathartic escape, especially when I can document the process that goes into these projects so others can learn. It's a bonus when a hobby is free 😉
Anyway... The important stuff is next. Here is what I've been up to as I try to become more of a supportive voice in the community.
✅ Speak at a conference
2022 ended on a real high and 2023 started with a bang 💥
My appearance on Notes from the Dev was posted in December and then just last week I gave my first ever industry talk, at the Unpacked event. Both were such great experiences.
Watching both recordings back made me feel a lot better about how I present myself, how I present my topics, how clearly I speak, how clearly I can explain things in plain English etc. I'm certainly far from perfect and I've taken learnings away from those videos, but I had to push through some major imposter syndrome to just say yes to both of those opportunities. To come away happy from those experiences and recordings is a major plus!
I don't want to go through my life story, but I wasn't interested in giving talks and posting content for the community, for most of my career. My priorities were work, freelancing and travel.My point here is, it's been so great to able to naturally switch mindset towards the community and how quickly I was able to reap the rewards of the work I've put in.
Right, on to the good stuff...
Parcel Unpacked talk:
Developers: Zero to Hero My 28 minute talk on steps all developers can take to become better problem solvers and to help with future job prospects.
Notes from the Dev podcast:
Notes from the Dev: How to Use Faux Absolute Positioning in EmailMegan invited me on to have a chat about a module I built for one of our client projects at Mayoris, where we pushed the already established Faux Absolute Positioning technique to work for quite a complex design that could adapt to dark mode and client management.
✋🏾 This video perfectly accompanies the post I wrote for our blog which runs through all of the finer details of the build.
Email Peeps:
Andrew at bettr.email asked if I wanted to participate in a new profile series he started, to find out more about some of the people in the email community. It was quite an interesting thing to do, giving a quick look into my journey and personal life. I've always wanted something like this in our industry, especially seeing people's work setups.
Looking forward to seeing some of your stories 🙂
One for the experiment fans...
Leading up to the Unpacked event, I was super busy with Mayoris work as well as rehearsing my talk, constantly making updates to my slides as I fine tuned my talking points. Eventually I just needed to take a break from that routine. After tweeting about an idea I saved over the Xmas & new year break, I decided to take on this quick challenge.
I scoured stock imagery sites for something I could work with and eventually stumbled upon an image of one of my favourite foods, Sushi!
Here is the mock up I cut up and pieced back together and then added the text, using Photoshop:
The first step is built, but there is still a lot of fine tuning needed around better incorporating the text into the falling food items. At the moment it overlaps a couple of smaller items but it still seems off and a little disjointed, but the major points of the idea are in there:
Live text
The text sitting in between the different food layers
Accessible
Dark mode friendly
An extra detail I want to attempt is adding a parallax effect to the different layers 😲 I haven't attempted that in email yet, so this is a good example of trying something new out for fun.
No ETA on this as we have a big start to the year at Mayoris. We've got some really exciting interactive projects to build which we'll hopefully be able to write about and show-off in the coming months. With a busy workload I'll just keeping adding to this fun project when I can, but I'm hoping in Feb I can share maybe just the base using faux absolute as a part 1 and then part 2 could be a 'shooting for the Moon' project with some form of parallax implemented 😀
That's all folks...
Sorry, this was a long one!They won't all be like this and this is what I get for not making time to send more regularly.
Feel free to reply to this email or reach out on Twitter, Linkedin, Mastodon or the Email Geeks Slack group if you have any questions or just want to chat about something email related. Always down for diving into a problem and geeking out with people. You can find the links to my socials on my website.
I'm also open to sharing your work if you don't have an outlet yet or you have something interesting to share with the community. I can take a look and share in this newsletter or even offer feedback if I notice anything you could work on. I'm here to help 😁
Anyway... Stay safe,Niven ✌🏾