Opps... I forgot to update last week. Last week I did a lot of work on all the sites that I've been working on. I finished up my portfolio site and got a few versions of the Little Giant site up. I also got a lot of work done on the Tabe Tai site, which you can access by clicking on the respective links in my portfolio site.



Click Here to View Portfolio Site


Click Here to View Tabe Tai Site


Click Here to View Little Giant Site

This week I spent a lot of my time getting most of the buttons up on my portfolio site. I also worked on the advertising page of that site quite a bit trying to see how I wanted to present the larger images of the thumbs present on that page. I went through several ideas and some trial and error but I finally got something functional that I'm pretty happy with. When you hover over the images and link buttons on the advertising page an a larger image or file will present itself until you hover off the thumb/link button. I'm working on doing that to the rest of the pages and will then continue work on the other sites that I'm working on like the Little Giant and Tabe Tai sites. I also want to get a css version up of my portfolio site with the flash intro and I think I should be able to get that done as well.


Click Here to View Portfolio Site

I thought I'd get this up tonight while I was thinking about it in case I forget tomorrow. I did more more on my portfolio this week. I decided to do the paper transitions on the timeline instead of calling them as external swf files since that part has been giving me so much trouble and I'm not exactly sure why. However, the pages are working as they should be now. I'm still going to use the card game idea which was meant to replace this if I never got it to work. Instead, I'm probably going to go with the idea in going all out with the animations and have a card peeking through somewhere and either have it moving a little or have it move the mouse hovers over it. The cards will then just act as splash to the html/css version of the site and so that way there will be several different ways to get to the same content and in a sense showcase what I can do in flash and in html and css.


Click Here to View Index Page

Apart from breaking apart the work I had done on the portfolio site and reconstructing it, I also continued work on the layouts for the other portfolio pages. The layouts for these pages aren't set in stone as of yet but I'm pretty happy with them.




I should note that I don't have these pages placed up on the portfolio site yet. The only page images right now is the advertising page. I did also make the buttons on the advertising page though they don't currently go anywhere since I'm still playing around with how I want the thumbnail images to link to larger preview images of the same files shown.

I'm sorry I'm a little late. My eldest sister drove down on Thursday from Tennessee and I've been losing track of time ever since she's been here. I finally found the time to just sit down and post what I've been up to. This past week I came up with a new idea for my portfolio. If all else fails since I still haven't been able to find out what is wrong with the preview portfolio page I was working on, I hope that this piece will be able to stand on its own. If I do get my other idea to work out, I hope that I'll be able to implement this idea into it. The general idea is a game of "pick the card." A hand shuffles the cards around and when it's done, you have the option of picking a card. The card is then taken off the screen, flipped, and then slid back into place with a menu card. This menu card tells you what the card will take you to if you click it again. When you click it again (though I don't have the pages coded yet) it should take you to an image gallery of sorts that you can click to view the pieces on that particular page. These pages will probably be coded in css and possibly javascript rather than flash.

Click Here to Preview

I should note that since I uploaded this version of the file, I found out how make a transparent background on flash and I will be using that instead of the pale yellow I threw on there to make the stage easier to see while I was working on it.

This week I messed around a little more with the email form that I made earlier. I wanted to keep things simple but still have elements from the rest of the site that I wasn't sure was quite there with the earlier version of the email form. I played with drawings for the side and decided to the cactus since it is prevalent in most of the pages. I also played around with the idea of adding a custom scrollbar since I wasn't too fond of the default one that comes in flash since it kind of stands out like a sore thumb with the rest of the graphics which lend themselves to be warm and just a little grungy. First I tried messing with the components of the default scrollbar but all that gave me was errors so I searched around for a tutorial online and tried a few of them until I found one that actually worked. I'm pretty happy with it right now since it's shiny and new and working but who knows, I may still end up playing around with it. I should add that I had a few friends test the form out using the print and send options on their computers and it works.


Click Here to View Email Form

I recently purchased the ActionScript 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS4 Professional book and while I'm sure I won't use most of what is in the book I did come across something that I thought would help me in my website projects. There is a chapter in the book on Printing and sending email with actionscript. I decided to try this tutorial for my Little Giant site and came up with the following:


Click Here to View Email Form

I'm not sure if that will be the final layout for the page but I'm pretty pleased with the results. I don't seem to be coming up with any error messages so everything should be in working order but I've yet to fully test it out.

I tried working a little more on my portfolio site but I can't do much until I can get the problem fixed with the navigation. I still haven't figured out why that last frame on the page animation doesn't want to work. So I put that aside for a while and worked more on one of the fictitious restaurant sites I'm working on. At first I thought I wanted to do a sliced background in css for it but after fiddling with the code and images for several hours so I could get the sizes right and the tiling to be seamless I decided I didn't like how it looked with the background of my SWF file so I scraped it and went for a solid background until I can make something I like that doesn't seem too busy with the rest of the site. As far as working in Flash, I reconstructed pages, opting for several small image files versus one large image file. I've added the Career pages and you can now go back and forth between the page sections whereas before you had to hit the main button to go back to the main page to navigate to the desired page in Careers for instance.

On a side note, I will probably have to make a preloader for the site since the file is getting pretty large but I haven't started on it yet. So if it takes a while to load it's not because the page is empty, it's just taking a while to load.


Click to view site

I'm still working on the other site but I haven't nailed down a layout I want to use for the rest of the site. I want it to resemble a scroll, much like the print menu I made that is the inspiration for the site but I haven't decided how I want to go about doing that yet.

(I guess Blogger has it set to a different time zone because it says I posted this in Friday when it was 30 minutes past midnight here when I posted... Ah well...)

Sorry I'm a little late. I drove to Fort Rucker in Alabama to see my older brother who is flight school and it was family day so I got to see him fly and I thought I would be home on time to post but it's been a crazy sort of day. I fixed the problem I had last week with the buttons not targeting the flash file I wanted. It wasn't anything in the coding that I did wrong as far as I know... I ended up having to remake the buttons in Flash and then stuck in the same actionscript I used before and it worked so I guess Flash was just being buggy. You can click the link below the image to view the work I've done so far on it. (I should mention that the pen to the right will load the main SWF file that acts as an index to my portfolio since you can't see the links on the post-it or the links on the record player once the paper comes over it.)


Click Here to View Index Page

I am having another problem with it unfortunately. For some reason Flash doesn't want to load the last frame of the file I'm targeting externally and it's where I have the actual thumbnail images to the site content and eventually links that will take you to larger images of those files. I'm not seeing anything wrong with actionscript again and it's driving me a little batty trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong because if I load that file by itself it works perfect it's just when I try to load it from my main SWF file that it starts to act wonky. In any case here is what one of the last frame of one of the sections will look like. There will probably be at least a total of three of these, one for each section of the site. This is just a preview of what will be on the actual paper index. I decided to lay everything out in Illustrator first since it's so much nicer playing around with image, font, and line placement there.



I decided on image links to my creative package which will like the links say take you to images of a business card, letterhead, and envelope I designed as part of a portfolio package in my last advertising class. I'm hoping to learn how to integrate light box with Flash in this project and that'll be a great learning experience for me. I've found a few tutorials, it's a matter of sitting down, making myself sit down and read it step by step instead of breezing through and skipping steps like I usually like to do with tutorials (A really bad habit).

I'm working on a few things at once. I'm still working on creating the first food website that I showed you but I've also started work on another which will be a Japanese restaurant based off these menus also made in my Publication Design class.




Click Here to View the Site in Progress

All I have for it is for is the following image. I plan on having the butterfly at the bottom corner be the link to enter the rest of the site which will feature the menus along with pages containing information on what would be the restaurant if it were real.

I'm also working on getting my portfolio site made. I have the basic design laid out and I've started adding actionscript to the flash file, however, I'm having trouble with getting it to go to the next frame or target to an external file. I don't understand why it's not working, I have the code right and I'm not coming up with any errors but basically, when you click on, "Advertising, Publication Design, or the Digital/Web link, I want the following movie clip to play and then stop, showing the piece of paper with a list of menu items/preview images that you can click on. These items will either link to image files or html pages featuring the work shown in the preview images.


Click Here to View Index Page

Currently the buttons I have working are the round black and gray buttons on the record player. The black button should take you back to the portal page of my website and the gray button is an email link that should open up outlook or whatever email client you're using.

If the buttons on the post-it would work then this it what it should look like.


Click Here to Preview Movie Clip Transition

I made more page layouts for this potential site and am in the process of loosely putting the pieces together in Flash. The only working buttons right now are the History and Company buttons located under the About menu.


Click to view swf file

I've been taking menu designs I did in Publication design, expanding on the design and trying to create what would be companion websites for them if they were real companies. This first menu is for a roadhouse type of restaurant and I wanted a rustic feel to it. I'm creating each website page individually in Illustrator and then I'm going to important the files into Flash and code the files for the web. This is what I have so far:

(Menu Designs)

(Web Design)

Project Proposal

For the project, I would like to create a portfolio site that is a compilation of new and old work. The work would include projects done in both advertising and publication design, along with work done for the web. I will also be building site designs in flash and possibly through other media such as css, html, and javascript (maybe), throughout the semester to create a stronger web background.