To Err is Human...

To really louse something up takes a computer.

Stage:

Always on the lookout for a design to parody...

See the pitiful tattered sign? It's been on our door for years. The message is true. One day, we thought: "Can we re-create the design using web trickery?"

Well, we did it!

If you're a youngster, you might not recognize the technology alluded to by the design. Computer (dot matrix) printers used to be large noisy devices that used stacks of perforated paper that were spooled by knobbed wheels on the device.

Predictably, sometimes the paper/knob combos would get out of alignment and the paper would jam or the print could get misaligned. The sign is a reminder of the 'not so good-ole days.'

The sign recreation is below and uses some cool CSS trickery. Be sure to study the source code! Of special interest are the inline span styles that warped certain letters in the last phrase. A eureka moment: To the the letter rotations, the spans had to be styled as inline-block elements otherwise, the letters just stood there doing nothing.

We don't normally use style attributes in HTML but in this case they were warranted. An example, where we styled the 'e' in the word 'takes':

<span style="vertical-align:-9px; letter-spacing:2px; transform:rotate(-10deg);">e</span>

We have to brag:

...see how the door texture shows underneath the 'dots' in the paper? We're especially pleased with that!
...we took a sample of the oak door texture and used it for the parody background and the 'holes' background
...We also used some position:relative styles to move our phrases into place on the computer paper image. That's not always easy to do.
...The page can lag as the photos load and the CSS renders. Therefore, we temporarily 'hide' the content and display a 'loading' message. Once the page loads (thanks, JavaScript!) we re-class some elements and it looks spiffy and professional!
...we keep the footer at the bottom of the page with a 'stickyFooter' class so even as the page loads with no appreciable body content, the footer is below where it belongs.
...some nice shadows beneath the parody sign and the 'door' frame
...a first-pass attempt at responsiveness with scalable font. See comment below

Sadly, this design is not perfectly responsive. We added some inline-styles: style="font-size:3.3vw;" which scale to the browser width. It's not perfect but some media queries would help the verbiage scale more elegantly. In the next stage perhaps?

Some followup, courtesy of Copilot!

This year, we've been going crazy using AI tools to enhance our workflow and creativity. Looking at the poster one day, we wondered if Copilot could render a similar design using only CSS. Well, you be the judge! Just by loading up an image of the poster, check out Copilot's CSS rendering!

Now, to really really louse things up, AI has entered the picture! What could possibly go wrong?!

... l.o.a.d.i.n.g...