Monthly Archives: December 2010

A Year in Portfolios

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I’ve gone through 3 different portfolio layouts in 1 year

I’m kind of a redesign junkie. I remember reading somewhere that the best designs come from something solid being tweaked and adjusted over time to streamline and refine it, and I completely agree. But most of the time I design something and leave it alone for months and months, and when I come back with substantial new material (or like this time with a whole new type of material to accommodate) I just decide to completely overhaul the whole thing. Maybe it’s therapeutic, maybe it’s just getting into the mode of the work. I don’t know what it is. But I like it. I don’t do enough web stuff constantly, so sporadic in-depth projects are fun to do every few months.

Over the last year I guess I’ve had a bit of a light-colored-site fetish. Both of my earlier portfolios are very white and light gray. Interesting.

The first one is more my style of portfolio site, much like this one, where I’m trying to show as much as possible out of the stuff I’ve done that I like. I like giving a full picture, with lots of information. And I’ve done a lot of stuff, and lots of different kinds of stuff, so I like being able to remember it and show it. Believe me, just in making this it’s been a bit of a trip, going through all my old work, having to find some of my old work I’ve put in storage elsewhere. Fun fun.

I’m pretty proud of the translation from design to completion for this site. It’s almost exact. The top left link caption idea didn’t work, but I’m fine with that, I actually like having the other two links up there better, and room for a third. The footer was an afterthought, but I like it. The image gallery doesn’t work correctly, but that shouldn’t be my fault. It used to, and does on other sites, so I don’t know why it’s not working right here. But the images are up and viewable, that’s all I need. Lastly, the end of each post is a little different, where it lists the ‘Class:’ it also says ‘Personal’ and ‘Freshman’ instead of having class and year separated. But whatever. I don’t want to fudge around until I get it right, it’s good enough now, and if I hadn’t mentioned these flaws I’m sure nobody would have been bothered. :P

Note: The gallery functions work now, it was a simple fix, something I just didn’t know about. Make sure you leave wp_head() in your header file if you’re making custom WordPress themes.

2010 Web Design

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various web design projects of 2010

These are various web projects I’ve done over the last year that reached various levels of completion. There’s an all-code layout, some purely design pieces, but the ones that made it to code were pretty cool I thought.

First, obviously, is my personal blog layout. I don’t keep up with any blog well, but this one was an accomplishment to build. You can see it in action here.

The grungy typewriter musician layout made it to HTML code but was never adapted to any kind of CMS or WordPress or anything.

The parchment-looking portfolio minisite I was really excited about, and it made it to code and I’m pretty sure to some sort of WordPress thingy, but I guess I never finished it. Not sure why I never ended up using it… I remember having trouble formatting text around the image of myself at the bottom right, so maybe that was it. But I kind of also remember ending up with a usable, finished theme from it. Oh well. Oh no I did finish it, I just found it :P . I finished an HTML/CSS translation of it, but never took it into WordPress. Not sure why, but the coded version right now works fine.

I got really into cooking a while back, and still am, so I mocked up the food blog layout. It made it through to HTML/CSS.

I really like the blue portfolio idea. I never used it because just thinking about gave me trouble figuring out how to adapt it into a workable WordPress layout. It would be really cool, and I’d be super proud of it, but I’m cool with something simple like I’ve got at the moment. I tend to get wordy too, so having something that works large and small is probably better than this one.

Final – Folding Wooden Silverware Set

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come up with an assignment that will push you and do it

After looking through our past assignments and figuring out what pushed us the most and brought out our best work, we had to come up with an assignment for ourselves that would do that even more and then do it. We’d bring in our assignment and the final product. My assignment was the following:

Make a usable object that either moves (not portable, but moves) or has moving parts.

I used wood, because I’m liking working with it, and a usable object because we hadn’t yet and I wanted to all semester. To accommodate the project, I decided to make a Swiss-army style folding silverware set. I found a woodworking store in Cambridge with a bunch of mahogany blocks for 10 bucks.

The casing is one piece, I tried cutting the three pieces out of it to use for the utensils, but when I chiseled them out they chipped and the casing chipped, so I scrapped that plan. I kept the utensils rectangular, so they’d fill the casing as completely as possible. I chiseled (very carefully) and hand-sanded out the spoon and used a wooden dowel through the whole piece for the hinge, epoxied into place on one end.

So far, all I’ve heard about food-safe care of wooden objects is keeping them clean and soaking or rubbing with olive or linseed oil whenever it gets dry so it doesn’t splinter. Pretty simple :) . I’ve got some future projects in mind for the rest of that wood, food-safe and not.

Word Sculptures

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make 5 pieces that embody our word

We had to use 5 materials we liked using to make 5 pieces that embodied our word. Each piece had to either exaggerate or contradict whatever strategies or techniques we used to make the previous piece.

Simultaneity isn’t always an easy thing to convey. For me, so far, projects had to be something recognizable, something used or known in real life. I didn’t deal well with the abstract. I didn’t work that way. I still don’t, really. So I immediately hated this project.

The first piece was made in-class on the day we got the assignment, but was constructed in such a way that it couldn’t be moved, and therefore wasn’t saved. Everything was balanced and arranged just so, any attempt to pick it up would make the whole thing fall apart. I had trouble with the abstract nature of the assignment at first, but once it started looking like a big sailing ship under construction, I had no trouble playing with an abstracted image of that.

The second idea came to me as a random doodle in art history, and was meant to just be lots of different kinds of construction methods, shapes and materials at once. I was particularly excited about the structural stuff I did with the cardboard, cutting two notches and two slots so they’d fit together and the notches would fit around the wooden piece on all sides, holding the cardboard fixture on top of the pillars. I contradicted the totally-random and unplanned nature of the first piece in making this one; it’s meant to be displayed with the diagrams and plans in the sketchbook.

The third piece is my least favorite in terms of a piece, but probably the best in terms of the assignment. I just doesn’t look very finished or good, but it embodies my word very well by being a bunch of things that all look like that, nothing else. This one was supposed to be contradicting the planning of the previous piece by just closing my eyes while I made it, but that didn’t work very well, I just kept peeking. A classmate suggested I not limit myself, but make it about only doing that one thing instead of thinking about how to make the whole piece, to just focus on making each connection until they build up to the whole piece.

After those two I went home for a long weekend over Thanksgiving, and I finished the rest once I got back. I got on a roll and finished the last 4 very quickly the day I got back to school.

Fourth, I wanted more of a finished looking piece, to contradict the random nature of the previous one. So this one was very arranged-looking, very finished-looking and I don’t know what it is, but I like it. I like the suspension of the string, the little spikes through the paper rolls, the cardboard notches and the civil-war-rifle-collection-look of the whole piece.

Last, I used the spike-through-paper-roll idea but took it as far as I could, using one giant roll, big cardboard pieces and a bunch of big spikes and making that the whole piece. I wanted to keep the taut string too, so I put that in as well.

Overall, I opened up a bit to abstract work, but I’m alright with it not being my preference.

Photo Book

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hand-made book of the word photos that embodies the word

This was cool. I like the idea of making books, for any reason, so that was enough to make it cool. Although, the word project getting on 3 weeks was getting a bit old for a class that was so far moving pretty quickly. Nonetheless, the photos was fun and the book was simple enough and worked out mostly.

It’s meant to be opened entirely and looked at all at once, so all images are visible simultaneously. Also, if viewed from one side, all the darker, more colorful and warmer-toned images are visible from foreground to background, from the other side all the lighter, black-and-white or just less-colorful images are visible. It worked out pretty well I think.