In April, I decided that I needed some sort of showcase to assemble all of my creative works into. I had some general ideas about what I wanted to do, but turning them into an actual page was harder than I thought. From the start, the idea was show a cluttered desk and the creativity that lives in it.
I took a bunch of pictures of my desk, but found it was hard to show the whole desk and the clutter in it in the restricted resolution of a web browser. I finally got the perfect balance with my different interests represented by the different items on the desk. I have the site prepared so that most of the objects could have links implemented, but in the final portfolio I only use some of them. The highlight effect was an idea I came up with after my brother told me there needed to be more of a visual clue when you mouse over something clickable. Further testing showed me that people were still confused about what they could click, so I added the linkbar at the bottom. The background image was made with some grunge brushes, and really makes the site pop.
The inside pages turned out to be a bit harder to develop, since I didn’t know the javascript at the time. Each item has its own ID, which starts expanded, but then is immediately closed by the same javascript you use to toggle them on and off later. You can disable Javascript (and CSS too!) and the page will still render in a completely useable way. That was one of my important goals, because I wanted to make sure the page worked on older browsers and portable devices.
With the inside pages, I found boxes to be really boring. So instead of drawing a full box, I create the illusion of one. The two lines in the header box and the navbar are flush with the edge of the page, creating a natural enclosure. The individual portfolio items feature a partially-opaque png background, which gives them definition as well (unless you are on Internet Explorer, which gets passed a special style sheet because it ignores png alpha channels and renders the background as a pink splotch). The blue and grey theme is one I particularly like. It has more personality than a standard black on white, but it isn’t painful to read either.
Interesting that my portfolio is featured in my portfolio, no? For more information on the php flat-file databasing engine that powers it, click here.
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