Responsive

The design now adjusts for viewing on mobile and tablet browsers along with desktop browsers. I revised the approach I was taking for displaying individual projects in order to create a consistent viewing experience for all projects on all devices. If you viewing this from your desktop feel free to resize the browser window and test it out.

Portfolio Plugin

When I first launched this site I was using a custom post type with custom taxonomies to manage the portfolio section. I recently came across Devin Price’s Portfolio Post Type plugin which is doing the same thing, just with a little more polish. I have switched to using this plugin in place of the code I had in my theme.

Some of the benefits of using this plugin are:

• It adds a portfolio count to “right now” widget on the dashboard.
• Post thumbnails, categories and tags are displayed in the column view in the admin. This makes managing post much easier.
• Custom icon display for Portfolio menus.
• Having this code in a plugin and not in my theme files will make redesign’s easier in the future.
• The plugin is also available on GitHub in case I ever want to fork it to modify to my needs.

I just finished integrating the HTML5 Boilerplate into my theme. I’m a little ashamed about how long it took me to research the boilerplate. Many people have been using it but I did not want to use it just because it was the new thing to do. After spending some time reading the documentation and seeing how easy (and encouraged) it was to customize to your needs I started updating my template files.

One of my favorite features is the normalization approach to CSS rather than a full reset. It never made sense to un-bold a <strong> tag or remove all bullets from <li>‘s by default. The Boilerplate instead makes all the necessary changes so you know everything will have the same appearance in all browsers. It does remove styles from unordered list’s when used inside of a <nav> tag so you can quickly get started styling navigation. I also like the approach it takes for adding and organizing javascript and getting everything setup to start using HTML5 tags (which I will be adding more of).

If you have not yet explored the Boilerplate I suggest you check it out to start your next project. The are many more features baked in that you can go find out more about.

Other Misc Improvements

A number of weeks ago I also upgraded to WordPress 3.2. I had been looking forward to this release for the UI improvements alone. I started using it for some development testing at work so when it was officially release I did not hesitate to upgrade, I knew it would not break anything for this site.

I also improved the layout for project visuals in the my portfolio. I am having to recreate the visuals for all projects so I only have a few available for now. I will be adding more over the next couple of weeks.

Wow! It has been way too long since I have had a website worthy of any self respecting designer. The previous version was a quickly thrown together when I moved to Denver so I had an online portfolio to help me land a job. It has served it’s purpose, twice. Now I am happy to launch an all new version.

The Soft Launch

I have been working on this site off and on for months. Making design tweaks here and development changes there. It’s time to push it live and all of you can watch as I post new projects and make revisions and improvements. Oh wait, I probably need some visitors first! I guess that means I can make all sorts of changes and no one may ever know.

The Work

As of now the primary purpose of this site is to display my work. I am planning to keep a full archive of all my projects, not just the good ones, everything. I will however limit what is shown to the public. Everything else will serve as an archive for my personal reference. I am continuing to add current and past projects so keep an eye out if your interested. Oh ya, I need some visitors first!

The Blog

It has been almost 4 years since I’ve had a blog. It was never something that I put of a lot of time into and I am not sure if it will be much different this time around. One thing I have been struggling with is what I will blog about. I have thought about keeping all the content focused on topics related to design and development and creating new sites for other areas of interested. Let’s face it, that would take a lot of time. So, you can expect to see posts from my professional life with the occasional posts related to other areas of interest.

As you can see I am not following the traditional blog format. I have removed all the noise such as sidebars and widgets. This will allow me to have creative freedom to implement designs that will go along with the content (hence the submerged post). When I have a lot more content that is worth exploring I will implement a clean navigation system for browsing the archives, it’s not really necessary yet for this one lonely blog post.

The Technical Stuff

Everything is powered by WordPress. I have a custom post type setup for the portfolio and the theme is hand-coded from scratch. A little jQuery is used for the animation interactions and TypeKit is used to deliver the Anivers font. MediaTemple is used for hosting and I’m tracking traffic with Google Analytics.

As things continue to move along I will post updates on design and development techniques I implement. Until then feel free to asks questions or leave a comment.