We built MiniRepublic completely in the brand new Open Source e-commerce system Magento, and the implementation was featured on the Magento blog. It required quite a bit of hacking to the templates. I started with the blank theme, but had to adjust quite a few template files in order to present everything as it is right now. The default image resizer was replaced for a lightbox. Since we had lots of custom photography work of our products, we created some batch actions in order to resize them through Photoshop, which gave much better quality than the standard Magento resizing algorithms. The design relies heavily on the excellent Sauna font from Underwear, and while the initial implementation was based on sIFR, I replaced it later on with Cufon, which is much quicker, easier to setup, and could reliably be used to replace the fonts in the dropdown menu.
My name is Jeroen Coumans, I'm a freelance web designer, front-end developer and Drupal ninja from the Netherlands. I love to create beautiful, usable and accessible websites. On this website, you can find my portfolio as well as my personal weblog. Interested in hiring me? I'd love to hear from you.
After completing my BA in Arts and Culture I'm now doing a MA in Communication and Multimedia Design. More …
