Tryin to do my very best.

It will all make sense soon.

C'est La Fin!

The journey has come to an end.
My website is complete, finished and ready for viewing (best at 1680 X 1050)!

Jaime Barnett Photography

After many hours of designing, creating, tweaking, redoing, slicing, coding and at times nearly crying I have to say every last bit of work put into it was worth it. Although I still feel that there are some small things that could be changed (size, minor details, etc) it was a great learning process. Creating this website really was the final culmination of everything we learned in this class through out the semester, it forced me to design...and use the design elements we discussed many times over. It demanded polishing my Photoshop skills and allowed me to practice those design skills through typography, photography and the use of color. The most difficult part of this process occurred when it finally came time to open up Dreamweaver and actually build the website. I realized I had no idea what to do beyond the few notes I had written down from class. After hours of reading tutorials I finally found a youtube video that was precisely what we were doing and essentially saved my life...and website. This guided me through coding and uploading my site step by step and by the third page in I was able to actually understand what I was doing. By choosing this project I feel satsified in knowing I truly have learned something and even plan on doing another website more elaborately in the future. Although I didn't change exactly everything that we discussed during our critique I appreciated the feedback and think it's vital to any course of design action. It helped me understand how people were perceiving what I was projecting and basically guided me in the right direction. I hope everyone else has enjoyed this class (and at times it's frustrations) as much as I have, I certainly feel like I'm coming away with a better understanding of technology...in art education.

It is a L A T E update.

For my second and extremely late update on the progress of my website I have one main point to hit. The biggest obstacle I was running into at this stage of the game was how to design my portfolio page. I found that most personal portfolio sites have a link to an index of images which is how I started designing mine as well.

Originally I had planned to create an index in the same style as my main pages, using the twelve images in my portfolio only smaller and with a gold frame around each thumbnail. From there, you could click on a thumbnail which would make it bigger and bring you to individual pages which look like this:

But because I wanted you to be able to click "back" and "next" to navigate through the images, it didn't make sense to have an entire page of thumbnails. Sometimes when I am looking at someone's work I don't grasp the entire content because I instead choose which images I want to look at via their index page. I feel that when putting together a body of work it is important in determining the order and flow of images, it's not random images thrown together. As this process evolved I concluded that by allowing the user to have to click through each page they would be forced to see the entire portfolio. In conclusion, my final navigation page is as follows:

By clicking portfolio from any navigation bar or from the main page it will take you here. From here you can then click "enter portfolio" which will take you through each image with the option of going to the next image or back to the main page. I think this setup will be much more appropriate for my work.

It is a L A T E ad critique.

The World Wildlife Foundation has found a niche in their advertising, which I believe cleverness holds the foundation for. Many of their ads, which are simply quick reminders to think about the earth, have a creative, playful feel while dictating an extremely important message. I wanted to share a few of their advertisements to show the cohesion that all of their ads possess and the overall concept that is communicated quite clearly.

"Give a hand to wildlife."


"15km of rainforest disappears every minute."


Their ads even have a similar color scheme, they are easily recognizable with big bold subjects and invoke thought about what is meant by their ad.

"Before it's too late."

Of the few I found to review, I believe this advertisement has the most impact for many reasons. Again, it is a simple advertisement (as this seems to be my trend) with a message that could probably be understood with or without the text. Granted these are natural colors that a designer had no intention of changing, but the continued use of a slightly unnatural and almost somewhat desaturated version of these colors connects this visually to their entire campaign. The use of their color-editing stands behind the message that is being sent, it is somber, still looking and meant to cause heavy impact. However, this ad is most effective because of the message being delivered. The trees were designed to resemble lungs that are slowly being deteriorated which is meant to represent the destroying of our earth's rainforests. The ad is designed as lungs with the notion that trees are essential to our environment because they provide oxygen. Overall this particular advertisement is an effort to stop destroying our rainforests and gracefully does so on both an aesthetic and sociological ground. Their small logo and text provides visual identification but does not detract from the ad due to it's size, placement and white color. I believe this ad would work well in print and/or on the web given it's design.

It is in the works.

So, in all honesty I have felt a little behind schedule in the making of my website. I say this only because I have been spending nearly an hour a day fooling around with layout, template, design, and colors only to walk away from the computer with nothing solid or complete. However, it (it being the skeleton of this project) finally dawned on me this morning...and it's been progressing ever since! Breakthrough! Most importantly, I have been trying to find a way to incorporate a particular set of frame brushes (since I am creating a photography portfolio), a wallpaper pattern and my images. After doing a few tutorials and reading up on 'how to create a website in Photoshop' I was also able to better understand a few small details that didn't make sense. Each page is being created at 1000x800 at 72 dpi to stay within range of the average size of viewing.

http://www.entheosweb.com/photoshop/layout.asp
http://www.adobetutorialz.com/articles/2967/9/Making-your-own-portfolio-web-page
http://www.freephotoshoptemplates.com/templatesbox/templates/tb017.htm

Here are a few of my alternate attempts:



However, nothing seemed to make sense. As I was going through some of the photographs I plan on using in my portfolio section, I realized that the few I had against black backgrounds may work well AS the layout of my site. Going with this theme, I've decided to create my content on a black background - which additionally is a very successful way of presenting photographs, on black - using the frames as buttons and the wallpaper pattern as filler!


By creating multiple layers I have been able to include my own photograph (for example, at the bottom) and create buttons out of a brush by embossing the layer then adding a fill. While I still am not 100% sure about exact layout of each page, I feel relieved to have a direction and theme to work with.