Design Gallery and Finishing Touches

So I finally got round to sorting out the design gallery. This presented a few problems in the form of missing loads of formating on pictures and then having to go back and change loads of CMYK to RGB and stuff like that. But I got it done in the end and there it is. I also added a few more photos and illustrations to their appropriate gallerys since I found a couple of extra bits, double checked my code, live viewed everything and as far as I can see it's all ready to go live. So tommorow I will upload. And then we shall see the results.

Back To Weaving The Dreams

So now that 2010 is done and dusted and all of my drawingly requirements are also done for now I had time to get back to what I supposed to be doing with my time: building my website. Filling up my gallerys was priority one. It took a long time to format 100 or so images and make thumbnails of them as well but it got done. It then also took a long time to insert aformentioned imagery into said gallerys in the requisite fashion and a pleasant order. Yes. That's right. Requisite. I chose a dead pigeon to be the fron of my illustration one because I like it. And that is the best reason to do anything and everything.

The next step was to input an animation into my website. Since I've only ever made one animation to date this was exceedingly easy. I simply clicked on a backing box and hit insert - media - swf - browse - file. Then resized it appropriately. At some point I'm sure that I will make some more animations in which case I will be forced to integrate them into a gallery system similar to that of my illustration gallery. But as it stands I have no need of such a system and this will be updated when necessary.

As you can see here, it works.

Then I realised that I hadn't actually put any imagery on my front page yet and It was in essence, a white box with a few bits of text sitting in it. It took me a while to decide what images to use. I didn't want to go for just one image as I think that this would narrow the field down too much and visitors to the site might think this is the only type of work that you do. So I went for a mixture of styles and disciples, focusing on illustration as this is my fortay. So I've got a colour illustration, a bold black and white one, a painted one and a line work one alongside a book cover design and a black and white photograph. I chose to focus the images in on a small detail as the larger images are available for viewing through the galleries. I think this works well as it creates an interesting composition, and a small insight into the variety of work that I produce. I chose to arrange them as below due to the fact that 3 of the images I chose to use were predominately green. So I split them up as much as possible.

Gallery Is Taking Shape

This has taken me about three whole days to work out how to make this jQuery work properly. I've tried many different versions and then gone for this one. It's basically a gallery where you have the thumbnails on the left and the main image on the right which changes according to which thumbnail you click. It has no images in this version but I have run a test version with some dummy images and it does definitely work. Above we have design view. Fascinating. 

Live view. I added a scroll bar to the thumbs gallery and shrunk it down so that I could leave space at the bottom to add text about the main image. I also resized the thumbs, changed the paddings and margins, both of the thumbs and the whole container. Overall there was a lot of jiggling code about to make it to how I wanted it but in the end I think I've made it work well.

Example of the roll-over function which enlarges the thumbnails when you scroll over them. All that remains now is to add content to this page. And then to copy it to the other categories of my gallery and then fill them up as well. Onwards.