Here are five web design trends which could shape 2013:

Prediction #1: Responsive Web Design

This probably isn't the most adventurous of predictions - since you certainly are aware of this trend already. Most of the sites we crafted in 2012 were responsive from the very beginning and 2013 will probably see responsive design establish itself as a must-have rather than a nice-to-have feature. Here is a selection of responsive sites we made:

http://hofratsuess.ch/
http://fidesbusinesspartner.ch/
http://likemag.ch

Prediction #2: Full Screen Backgrounds

One upcoming design trend, without a doubt, are full screen background images on websites. Like responsive web design it started to surface more frequently last year and will not disappear anytime soon.

Prediction #3: Centered Logos

A few years ago I always had the feeling that a logo should be in the top left or top right corner of a website. But since then many things have changed. Nowadays I am a huge fan of centered logos and predict more centered logos in 2013. LikeMag, one of our latest projects, features a centered logo.

Prediction #4: The Sidebar

After a few year in the wilderness the sidebar will have its comeback. Way back in the times when people used frames for their sites, sidebars were really popular and 2013 will see their renaissance - but this time with cool CSS3 transitions and mind-blowing effects.

Prediction #5: Retina Display Support

With Apple's line-up of high-resolution (hi-res) displays, we will hopefully see more support for Retina displays this year. We already released some projects with hi-res support:

http://hofratsuess.ch/
http://fidesbusinesspartner.ch/

Our 2012 Amazee Labs Christmas Cards are in the mail, perhaps even a few delivered by now. Inspired, in part, by a card designed to let the sender compose a greeting for any occasion (left), our version allows us to say, "Happy Holidays," in a number of ways (right). The beauty in the concept is that with just one design we are able to personalize every card in two ways. First, each recipient is greeted with a message tailor-made to suit our relationship and second, each card is hand-crafted by an Amazee Labs team member.

We came up with four greetings:

1. Wir wünschen Ihnen und Ihren Kollegen ein frohes Fest und erfolgreiches Geschäftsjahr 2013.
2. Wir bedanken uns für die erfolgreiche Zusammenarbeit in diesem Jahr und hoffen, dass wir im kommenden Jahr gemeinsam an diesen Erfolg anknüpfen können.
3. Wir bedanken uns für die gute Zusammenarbeit und wünschen dir, deinen Mitarbeitern und deiner Familie frohe Weihnachten und ein erfolgreiches neues Jahr.
4. Wir wünschen dir ein frohes Weihnachtsfest und einen erfolgreichen Start ins neue Jahr.

Perhaps the toughest part of the execution was arranging the words such that each greeting read correctly when highlighted, especially considering many words were shared.

Printing, tracing, and scanning the penmanship added to the personalized feel. 

Two photos from a Gstaad-bound train ride proved perfect for the desired look and feel.

The words and imagery came together with some creative license to complete the printed card.

Fresh off the press, the Amazee Labs team passed the pen to finish off over 100 cards.

That's about 25 cards per greeting.

And we couldn't be happier with the finished product.

Happy Holidays from Amazee Labs!

The Drupal Commerce module is a great solution for anyone who wants to have a shop implemented with Drupal. It doesn't matter if you configure the shop from scratch or if you use an installation profile, you can have a shop in a very short time. Most of the time is just configuration, almost no coding required.

By default, you can create your products, set the prices for them, categorize them, create rules for tax handling, use different payment gateways (also with the help of some contributed modules) and many many other things. Unfortunately there is one thing you cannot do just with configuration: a donation system. The main problem in the donation system is that the amount of each donation can be different. If your donation system has only fixed amounts, then there is no problem, all you have to do is to create one product for each donation amount. But when the amount is variable, then implementing this using only configuration may not be so trivial (if not possible at all).

I will explain next how we deal with this case, when we have to build such platforms.

The concept

If we go a bit deeper and check how the Drupal commerce system is built and how the price of the order is calculated, we can see that each line item from the order has a unit price field, that usually is populated with the price of the product to which it is associated. So the user clicks on the button to add the product to the cart, and this triggers the creation of a line item in the order that will have the unit price of that product. But in our case, the price of the product is variable, because it is about a custom amount that the user wants to donate, so we cannot really use that price to populate the line item. We will have to handle this by ourselves, to implement some logic that will populate the unit price of the line item with the amount of the donation. The solution involves site configuration, as well as some coding.

The main idea is to have a new field on the line items (a price field) that will be populated with the value the user wants to donate, and then using a rule that will be triggered on the event “Calculating the sell price of a product” to put the value from our custom field into the price field of the line item. The reason why we do not just put the value directly in the line item price field, when we create the line item, is that the price of the line item can actually be updated later. For example commerce_cart_order_refresh() would update the price of the line items. In this case, our code that populates the unit price will not be executed, and we will not be able to maintain the correct price of the line item. That's why we use that rule that fires on the “Calculating the sell price of a product” and we store the amount that is being donated in a separate field that will not be altered by any other code.

The setup

And this is how it works:

add a price field on the line item type (admin/commerce/config/line-items/product/fields), with the name: field_variable_price

create a product with the SKU “donation” that has the price set to 0

add a rule that updates the price of the line item

For the coding part, an example can be found in a sandbox project. An important remark for the coding part is that we actually have to create the order and add the donation product to the order by ourselves, because we have to populate the field_variable_price with the amount that the user want to donate.

The code also has a page: /donate and a configuration form /admin/commerce/config/donation_amounts where some predefined amounts can be configured. For more details about the coding part, you can just check out the sandbox project.

While finalizing this blog post I discovered that, since starting to implement this feature on a recent project, a new module called Commerce Donate surfaced on Drupal.org which might be interesting for you too.

Once a year our team gets together for a special night, the Christmas dinner. At this point let me say, we missed you deeply Kathryn, Andrew, Danny and Alex. It took place in Zermatt, at least it felt that way. In reality we dined right in front of Zurich airport, at the cosy Baracca Zermatt. After a nice platter of dried Swiss meat we enjoyed our Fondue and with it a great evening.

Let the pictures speak. Find more pictures on our dedicated image set on flickr.