Children Illustrations

Computer Illustrations
Many, many moons ago I worked on a Children’s CD. From concept, illustrations, animations and the final product in Director. Yes that long ago, not sure I even have a copy of Director anymore. I still include them in my portfolio just for the simple vastness of this project. And I still think the kids are cute =)

The CD included over 500 click-able objects that reacted to the child’s input, that cued an animation.

Textplate ‘07

Template Competition Design
I decided to work on my blog and try to update it. So I downloaded Textpattern. I had tried out many CMS solutions when building this site. So I kind of had an idea which one I wanted to use for my blog, I just had not gone about learning it yet. Install was great. The tagging is a bit unfamiliar so after cruising their site, I found a template competition. I decided it would be the best way for me to learn the CMS, pressure of a deadline hehe. I am still learning CSS and I am just getting back into the swing of designing (not plugging images into a template) but it was a pretty big learning process.

Easter History

E-learning Experiment
I created this project to learn different techniques that utilize flash as an E-learning tool. The text was pulled from a piece The History Channel & the images from Gettyimages. It includes a small scaled quiz system, streaming video gallery and an image gallery imported via xml. The quiz system has the capabilities (not implemented) to capture user information and store it in a back-end database per user.

The Hall Monitors

Guild Website
Even though I don’t play very much these days, I used to be a pretty avid WOW Player. I volunteered to update the website for our guild. The old site was in need for a make over. Information was hard to find and seemed very unorganized. I found a great host provider that specializes in guild websites that has a wonderful backend, tweaked one of the provided skins, created a header and tada!

Shay’s Corner

Daughter’s Site
A blog for my daughter. I am not very good at updating it. But she likes to look at it so it serves it’s purpose. I throw photos up there every month for Grandma. =) The images are from a series by a very nice artist Kemie, on istockphoto’s site. It currently uses flash for the photos and the blog, but I may port it a real blogging system someday.

Misc Art

Flash, Watercolors, Pen & Ink
Just a few of my art pieces. In one year I completed over 50 paintings and ironically burnt myself out on watercolors. I doodle every now and then but I have not done any traditional artwork for some years now. My formal training was with textiles (had my own loom), pencil, watercolors, pen and ink and cante.

Forth Fruit

Mock Site
This was my first CSS experiment using the Faux column technique years ago. I have a lot still to learn about CSS and it’s uses. Since we don’t use it much at work I have to do experiments on my own. I would provide a link but the code is very old and I have no idea how bad it truly is. =) I really like the design style of this piece still so I include it.

Our Extended Family

Community Site
My first Joomla! site and I really enjoyed the process of making this site. I created it so our immediate and extended family and friends would have a place to upload photos of the kids and share links and ideas. It has a blogging system for each user to post their own personal blog to share with others. Forum, link/newsfeed and uploading files are some of the features. It is fairly new so I am still trying to get others to use it.

CSS Experiment

CSS Layout
Found a great artist at squidfingers.com, who has some nice patterns by the way. Loved his layout and wanted to see how he did it. Was thrilled to see it was CSS so I downloaded and analyzed his CSS and this is the results. I really like the strong color theme of this piece so I may use the art work some day for something.