I just wanted to share this really amazing and easy to use gallery script.  I am going to be putting it in my new website using a wordpress plugin that uses its scripts.

The name is highslide and it has several uses.  It allows for easy display and cycling of pictures and images you post in your pages.  You can cycle through different pictures with the keyboard and even move the display boxes anywhere you want.  The display boxes have a number of different graphical effects including drop shadows and glows.  He also includes some really great ajax popups that you can embed html content, flash content, ajax content and iframes into.  For a demo of all these features, go to the official website here.

There are a number of wordpress plugins using this.  I’m not sure if they all work, but here are all the ones I found on a quick search of the extend category of wordpress.org:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=highslide

Aside from highslide, I found a pretty cool article about creating attractive and well designed blog post headers or just website headers in general.  They have a pretty large list, including one example from one of my favorite blog designs "veerle’s blog."  You can check out the article here.

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Even though I don’t HAVE to make a blog this week for class, I thought I would anyway.  I wanted to show off a picture of the portfolio case that I got last week.  It is a Pina Zangaro, White Acrylic Vista 11″x14″ portrait screwpost design (man that was a long description).  Here is a picture of it:

I got it at a trip to hull’s with my fiancee.  We were both surprised to see yale’s art school only a few feet away.  No wonder the prices were so outrageous.  Got to milk those yale parents dry right?

Also that weekend, after working on my site, we watched Art School confidential, a film based on a comic of the same title, because my fiancee is an art student at uconn where the program is pretty intense…Her professors recommended that she see it.  We both thought it was pretty funny and showed how full of shit most people in the art field, especially the professors, really are.

Back to my work…all I really have left to do is to finish styling my webpage and debug it.  Oh and print out the rest of my web PDF’s for my print portfolio.  The great thing about Wordpress is that you can export everything from an old site (for example this site right here) and import it into a new installation…like the site over at http://www.chrisyerkes.com.  All my content, settings and posts will remain intact!  That saves me a lot of work, woo hoo.

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Please excuse the look of the website while I am under construction.  Thank you

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That is mainly what I did this week.  I carefully took screenshots of all my websites, then saved them in a variety of formats, including an 8.5" by 11" PDF for my secondary portfolio.  I still have more samples I want to include, except they aren’t done yet (one being my new portfolio site and the other being a design done at my job).  I know I probably won’t be able to add one of them by the end of the semester, but my own personal site can be added.  Tomorrow I need to get my website’s copy for each page looked at by my professor to see if it is suitable for website and/or my print portfolio.

I also printed a webpage on my CMYK ink jet printer (has a cartridge for each color…pretty cool) onto a 8.5" by 11" piece of high quality, matte photo paper to see if the results would be good.  I think the colors are much too vivid, so I’m going to bring it in for my professor to look at and see if there may be a better way of getting high quality prints done for cheap (and at the correct color settings).

I also put my resume onto my finished letter template.  I tried hard to get it looking snazzy, but i’m no expert on typography (I haven’t even taken the class yet.  I will next semester though).

The last thing I worked on was getting my basic Wordpress template done (the template with all the php tags that output the blog posts dynamically).  After this is done, I just have to apply my design to it.  Hopefully it won’t be that big of a problem.  I remember this is the hardest step (adding your own design).  Dealing with each blog post and the titles, author and other stuff is a difficult task to get it all looking right.  Much more difficult on wordpress than it is on Joomla.  Maybe I should have gone with joomla, eh? haha.

The reading in "Building Design Portfolios," this week was about the non-traditional portfolio and web sites.  A non-traditional portfolio is usually something odd that you wouldn’t expect to show off design.  Some guy (Kevin O’Callaghan) made a huge 1 story model of a portfolio that got him his first job.  That’s just crazy in my opinion.

Reading "Designing a Digital Portfolio," it said some useful things about web site portfolios.  First of all, it said that a web developer had better show some advanced interactivity if they want to impress potential clients, but more than that, you should pick a website portfolio metaphor for your site (or you can pick more than one).  Looking through the metaphors, I figured my site would be a mixture of a gallery and diary site (since I am going to have a blog on it).  I’m also thinking of including a brochure element saying what services I can offer people when I am freelancing.

My boss is also looking for a new graphic artist, print designer and possibly a web designer.  Please visit their site http://www.mediainfocus.com (which I helped build) or send an email to kristen@mediainfocus.com with your resume, examples of work and cover letter.

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So this week, I was supposed to come up with a better self promotion idea.  I only came up with 2…which are almost the same thing. I think it is VERY hard to promote yourself well, especially if you are just starting out with little work to choose from.  I am a web designer and choosing something that can effectively promote my work seems to be a difficult task.  I decided to try making tiny moo cards (shown to us by our professor) each being a real world thumbnail image of a website I made.  I chose a thumbnail because of what my professor said to me; "you don’t want to give away the whole thing."  And on the back, I will have basic information and my web address so they can see the rest of the web page in full view.  I will also purchase tiny cases designed to hold the moo cards to give it a very cute and most importantly, un-tossable look.  They’ll likely save it and see it a few months or years later and give me another look, opening the door for more opportunities.

Other projects for this week I had been working on are the secondary portfolio I am making.  I have a very set idea of what I want so hopefully it survives critique.  I just want to do something very simple, like what I saw in a number of other student portfolios that were in class.  I want to have a metal binder with large see-through folder sleeves and print out my website screen shots in high resolution to put in there.  Each page would have a small description, name and url so people can read it while I’m making a presentation.  I would also like to show a number of different pages for each website.  I was looking through this weeks reading in "building design portfolios" and I happen to come across the exact type of binder I wanted!  Amazing.  It was the one used by stoltze designs.  Their layouts seemed pretty cool too.  Especially for me.  Some of the other portfolios were pretty awesome too.  I have to go and take a look in an art store soon for one and get cracking.

My website construction is going well too.  I am experimenting with a number of new techniques for this website, so it was initially hard to slice up my design.  I had to think for a while before I figured out exactly how to create my repeatable background patterns.  In the end though, it paid off and my total file size is very small for the whole site.  It totalled in at about 25 KB of images for the layout.  Pretty small sompared to other sites I have done at my job.

I also tried my hand at writing a cover letter.  This was a lot tougher than I thought because I had NEVER written one before.  I looked around the internet for a while to see examples of designer cover letters and got a hold of what I was supposed to write.  Hopefully it is OK.

Besides writing my cover letter, I have to start analyzing my text I write for each project on my webpage and print portfolio.  I have already written a bunch of short descriptions for many of my websites on my old portfolio site, but now I should go back and look it over again with things in mind I read about in "designing a digital portfolio."  Keeping things simple is what you should do.  Make sure grammar and spelling is perfect.  Don’t write too much.  I think I have this covered…but it doesn’t hurt to go back and check again.

I also found this video on youtube which I think any designer would find pretty darn funny : ]

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