This year marked the 25th anniversary of when Sutton Integrated began working with RioCan—and specifically for this blog, the designing of their annual reports. To commemorate the occasion, I decided to do a little write-up and retrospective of the last 25 years, creating a gallery to look back on all past cover designs.
It wasn’t easy.
Finding quality jpgs of some of the covers, especially the older ones, was a difficult task in itself. Back in the day, Sutton used different programs and storage devices (Quark? CDs?) that have of course been updated and replaced several times over the years. In the multiple shuffles of nearly three decades, it proved difficult to find old files that weren’t corrupt or using an extension that couldn’t be opened with modern design software, but with some digging, I was able to find all of the covers.
The most challenging part of this blog post was designing a gallery using my limited HTML and CSS knowledge. I first thought a carousel would work well enough, but some of the existing javascript on the site was causing the page to jump whenever you clicked to the next image. Also, the image file sizes were quite large, causing the page to load slowly. A coworker mentioned that a carousel was limiting in that you have to start at the beginning and work your way through to the end. He suggested laying out all the images so you could click on individual years. This thought led me to some research on how to best go about it. I discovered Lightbox (Modal Image Gallery) which was the best of both worlds. I typed up the code for Lightbox and resized and re-uploaded all the images. Low and behold, it looks great and works great. Check it out here: http://suttonintegrated.com/riocan-25.html
Gavin Sutton 