Given the hand-drawn nature of ay-pe’s latest and greatest project; an animated flip-book telling the story of the cultural history at Clitheroe Castle. Ay-pe asked if we could reflect the look and feel of their AV production and bring some movement to the page.

Initially, we discussed Adobe Flash (no) and  Javascript animation, but finally settled on a much simple, subtler and; I think, more elegant approach given that the content of the page no t the background deserved to be hero.

Those readers that follow the web-design community closely will have noticed a new trend for parallax backgrounds. There have been a few notable examples recently. The Rissington Podcast and Clearleft’s ‘Silverback‘ to name but two (with an excellent tutorial on how to recreate the effect by Carsonified here).

So; some brown paper, a few fluffy clouds, one friendly Owl and a lovely Quicktime movie were winged over by carrier duck (this is Sheffield pal) and we set to work implementing the effect. I’ll not wax lyrical here about the techniques. It’s all been articulated much better than I ever could on the Carsonified tutorial noted above.

I’ll just a big thank-you very much to the Sir or Madam that was crazy enough, drunk or both to have been messing around with CSS minus margins and wildly re-sizing their browser window!

Odd? Yes. Useful? Very!