Mighty Dream

Carefully crafting websites and other mighty fine products since 1995.

Mighty Dream is the web design and development studio of me, Eric Grossnickle. I'm a user interface designer with a passion for web standards and a background in computer science. My design principles are based in simplicity and subtle detail, and I write standards-based HTML and CSS.

I'm also experienced in the technical side of the web including a deep understanding of the scripting languages, PHP and JavaScript. In terms of frameworks, I'm familiar with the MVC design pattern commonly used as the foundation for many web frameworks including Ruby on Rails, Django, and CakePHP. I'm also a big fan of jQuery.

The Services.

  • Planning
    Brainstorming & Wireframing
  • Design
    Mockups & Prototypes
  • Interface Development
    HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
  • Backend Development
    PHP & MySQL

About Me, Eric Grossnickle

Interface designer and developer, homebrewer, vinyl enthusiast.

Eric Grossnickle

Yeah, that's me at 'the lake' in Maple City, Michigan.

Although Mighty Dream was only made official in May of 2008, I've been immersed in the web since I was in middle school—somewhere around 1995. I remember creating my first website, a fan page for the computer game, Quake. I created it in FrontPage on an old Acer laptop, uploaded it via dial-up, and hosted it on GeoCities—how times have changed!

I continued my interest in web development through much self-motivated learning. Eventually, I formalized this interest when I graduated from DePauw University in 2004 with a BA in Computer Science. But that only covered half of my interest—the more technical stuff. I was also interested, if not more so, in the aesthetics of the web.

So, I continued my education at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, graduating in 2008 with a MFA in Computer Arts / New Media. Here, my thesis project gave me the opportunity to not only create something that would test every aspect of my abilities, but also seek out several industry advisers who helped me realize my goal. In May of 2008, after taking some time off after graduation, I began working for myself under the studio moniker, Mighty Dream. Since April of 2009, I've worked closely with the ridiculously good team of people at Bust Out Solutions.

Originally from the fine state of Indiana, my wife, Alanna, and our two cats, Gris and Dante, left the SF Bay Area in 2010 and moved across the country and up north to the wonderful town of Traverse City, Michigan.

Elsewhere…

Colophon

This website was made on a Mac, designed in Photoshop, developed in Coda, version-controlled with Subversion, deployed on a Dreamhost Private Server, and stat-tracked with Mint.

The backend is custom-built in CakePHP and will be an on-going personal project. The pain of updating my last hacked-up, Wordpress-based portfolio was the motivation for creating something easier to manage. So, I wrote a CakePHP plugin that synchronizes work on this website from a collection on my Flickr account. With the number of dead simple ways to upload to Flickr, updating my work here becomes a breeze.

The Tumble section is powered by the great microblogging service, Tumblr.

A couple CSS3 properties are in-use here including @font-face, text-shadow, and box-shadow; the WebKit-specific property -webkit-transition is also used for subtle color-fades on hyperlink hover events. What I'm getting at is this site looks best in modern browsers like Safari 4, Firefox 3.5, and Google Chrome, but should degrade nicely in earlier versions. It will look decent in IE8, okay in IE7, and IE6 users will get a stripped-down version courtesy of Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS.

Although oft-overused, headlines are set in still-wonderful Museo; tumblelog published-dates are set in Junction. A few icons from the Glyphish collection are in-use here, as well.

Many Thanks

It's only appropriate that I dedicate a space to thanking the people who helped me get here.

So, thank you to Alanna for always supporting me, my parents, Steve and Lori, for everything, the rest of my family, Dave Berque at DePauw, Lourdes Livingston at the Academy, Blake Macleod, Todd Sieling, and Jeff Lin at Bust Out Solutions.

Also, thanks to the following design/CSS galleries and magazines who have featured Mighty Dream...