credits reel

thanks to the devs and artists

A lot of hard work went into this site, and only some of it was ours. We have a lot of developers, services, artists and designers to thank and recommend, below.

Businesses, services and tools that helped build playhacker

This page lists some of the people and companies that have helped build the playhacker system.  This is a living list. If there’s a site element you are interested in that we don’t cover here, send us a PM through the member messaging system and we’ll add it.  Note: this site is funded by affiliate commission, so some of the links on this page may fund further development (at no cost to you). 

Index

Graphics

Animated illustrations

We develop the animated illustrations ourselves.  Our current process looks like this:

  1. We build something,
  2. we photo the finished project,
  3. we pick the best angle for an illustration,
  4. we send the photo, and perhaps some concept mockups, to our artist,
  5. they make us a cartoon-style rendering in Photoshop,
  6. we pull renderings into Illustrator and clean them and bust them into labeled layers,
  7. we export as SVG,
  8. we open that file in Visual Studio Code and massage it for easy CSS targeting,
  9. we upload it to our site inline (using an HTML widget in Elementor, for example)
  10. this allows us to target each element inside the drawing, with CSS rules
  11. we write a bunch of animation routines and rules for it!

Concept photographs

Many of the photos we use to quickly illustrate concepts, or for project mockups, are from Unsplash.

Project illustrations

We develop the project illustrations by photographing our completed projects, and then passing them to a Fiverr artist named Azante, who traces them in an awesome cartoon style.

Site-section illustrations

Many of our generic illustrations come from VectorStock. Some of the artists we rely on the most are pathique and rogistok.

Hosting

Currently we use WP Engine, because of their robust development system.  For simpler sites that still need rock solid performance, the best alternative is Kinsta.  There are a lot of cheaper hosts out there, but when it’s really gotta work well, all the time, use the best!

CDN

Both WP Engine and Kinsta come with great CDNs, but Cloudflare offers so much more than just distributed content mirroring: firewall, image optimization, mobile optimization, wordpress optimization, and more.

This is a living document. If you don't find the info you need about one of the features or services we use, drop us an IM (through the member messaging system) and let us know. We'll add it!

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