The new Get Satisfaction website launched this past month and one of the more exciting aspects of front-end development for this project was building wheel of satisfaction for the home page. The concept is kind of like the wheel of fortune wheel, but instead of the entire wheel spinning, the items spin underneath the wheel itself.

When I first heard the wheel concept, I was told the client explicitly wanted no flash on the new site. This was a fun challenge, but not overly difficult with the Raphaël JavaScript library. If you haven’t heard of it, check it out at raphaeljs.com.

Without getting into any code detail, Raphaël essentially injects an image into an SVG canvas, which is part of the DOM tree, so JavaScript events can be added to it. The click event for the the red spin button calculates a random rotation angle in 30 degree increments, and then fires Raphaël’s animate function.

Anyway, that was one fun project to work on! My andCulture teammates did an amazing job with strategy and creative and the Get Satisfaction team worked tirelessly at the end to make it all happen!