It's business time

Received my Moo mini-cards last week!  Cannot wait to include them with my Etsy items.  :)

Website Design, Take 2

Just when I thought I had my new design hammered down, I had a fresh burst of creativity.  My original design is being set aside in favor of a cleaner concept.

This was my original design.  I liked the idea of using a large photo as the background.  I chose Lomography shots I'd taken, and planned to use a different shot on each sub-page.

Homepage with witty introduction (I'm still refining the copy.)

Concept for Bio sub-page

While I do like this design, I think it would work better for a photography portfolio.  I may still create this site as a web portfolio piece.  I really love the concept, and would love to use the images I chose in some context.  If anyone out there loves this, please send me an e-mail-- this could be your new site!

My latest design is a lot cleaner, simpler, and more representative of my work.  I'm still playing with proportions, but this is what I've come up with so far:

(The light pink vertical rectangles are guides, not part of the design.)

Eventually I will create a Flash enabled version of this site to showcase those skills.  ActionScript is beginning to make some sense, but I'm still waiting for it to really click.  

Meanwhile, I've started going through my work to chose which images to include in the portfolio section.  There were obvious noes, and a good handful of yeses.  The maybes are where I'm having trouble.  I'm trying very hard to be objective about my choices.  Just because I like them it doesn't mean they're a good portfolio piece.  I've also been extra creative lately, so there are pieces in the works that may make the final cut.  This is a happy problem, though.  There are some pieces on my website now that I'm not 100% proud of, but included anyway.  A big mistake I won't be making this time around!

Designing All Day

My website is long overdue for a redesign.  I built it years ago before I knew anything about creating a web page from scratch.  iWeb was the only program I had at my disposal, and while it's very user friendly (gotta love Mac software), it's far from perfect.  Throw in my disregard for file naming conventions, ignorance of SEO, and underdeveloped design style, and you've got yourself a real mess.  OK, maybe not a mess per se, but certainly not a site I'm proud of today.  Now that I have an arsenal of software and online resources, I'm ready to create a proper online portfolio.

My newest favorite is imgr, an online image color tool.  Simply upload an image, pick how many colors you want to generate, and voila!  imgr creates a customized color swatch based on your original pic.  I've used it a couple times already, and love it.  It's a great way to supplement color schemes I've already chosen, or to pick out colors within a photo that I didn't catch.

Above is a swatch I created for my website redesign.  Just a little too autumnal for my tastes, but adding a contrasting blue or purple might fix that.