08 ARD 214 A Digital Portfolio

This brief was given out just after the Christmas break when I was ill. Initially communication was by e-mail and I obviously missed the plot and started out planning for a website on serial-killers, well it seemed to be a good idea. I missed most of the CSS lectures. When I returned I found out that most of the work I had done was useless, but I did have a few ideas which I hope to adopt.

The brief directed me to produce: -

• An introduction to myself and my career aspirations.
• A digital curriculum vitae.
• A portfolio section clearly showcasing and explaining examples of my digital design work.

Most of my life I have been a photographer, I developed my first film when I was 10, it didn’t come out, but I was hooked. Over the years I have spent 10 years in professional film processing houses and I was a wedding photographer for 30 years. I have literally thousands of images from the past 50 years. Photography would be one of the sections in my web site. I also make furniture, both for the house and the garden and I am a keen gardener. So more sections are appearing, more recently I have been making my own jewellery. Since I started going back to college and now at University I am learning a myriad of design software, my love of computers is certainly helping me in this.

I look at various web sites to get inspiration about colour and layout, one site in particular help me decide on layouts and colours and that was

http://www.csszengarden.com/

Zen Garden Images

http://flickr.com/photos/25867722@N03/sets/72157605154359940/

This site was motivating there were some lovely layouts and colours; one in particular was called The Original by Joachim Shotter

http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=198/198.css

I loved the colourisation and the fact it didn’t appear to be in boxes, I felt this is the direction I would take.

I also liked: -

hhttp://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=200/200.css

http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=208/208.css

http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=204/204.css

http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=139/139.css

These sites gave me ideas which I hope to design my own site. I spent a lot of time trying to replicate the design of The Original look, but I could never quite get there, I chose as my colour scheme pink and purple which I felt went together well but I seem to have drifted a little. I don’t think my final site will look anything like the site I am developing.

One idea I have had right from the start was to have a scrolling index page which would act like a one arm bandit after you pulled the lever, it would slowly come to a stop and you have some of the names of the page on it, there would be directional arrows to move the through the list, both up and down. This will be built in Flash and then imported into the website. Because of my photographic background I am planning the list to look like 35mm film. The subjects on my site include: -

• Drawing
• Flash and ActionScript
• Furniture
• Gardening
• HTML and CSS
• Illustrator
• Joomla
• Photography
• Photoshop
• Pottery

Of course there would be room for more topics as and when they develop. I started building my site using PhotoShop and then to use slices to separate into their respective images, but there were some down sides to that system. It generated a lot more html script and lot of images. Also if I had to do any editing then I would have to do that in PhotoShop and then re-import it to Dreamweaver. Initially the idea was a good one but it was pointed out that I had perhaps given myself a lot more work, after all the object of the exercise was to learn html and CSS!

Images of original site

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25867722@N03/sets/72157605146387289/

I started working directly into Dreamweaver with CSS and found it to be a lot easier once I learnt the ways of Dreamweaver, I have produced 3 websites before, but I was using Microsoft FrontPage, but this too generates a lot mote html than is really needed. At this moment in time I have produced an index page together with links to Photography, Gardening and Furniture and they all work!!!

Images of 2^nd site

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25867722@N03/sets/72157605158310015/

I have a lot of work during the summer break sorting out images for my site and then getting them prepared for the web. I am really loving this project, its something I enjoy and like I said earlier, the site is going to change many times before I am happy with the result.