Some Really Cool Portfolio Websites

This week, April asked us to research some other designers and check out their portfolio websites. Not surprisingly, there were a number of really cool sites. Below are my three faves:

John Zmuda

The reason I love this site is for its simplicity. I love the overview of the designer's work space and his interface is beautiful.

Jason Reed

This site for John Reed is also a nice clean site. What makes it different for me is his illustrated self-portrait. A great way to "give a face to the name".

John Wright

John Wright's Photography site is an excellent Flash site. Although waiting for Flash sites to load is a pain in the kiester, the end-result is almost always worth it!

I checked out a wide number and variety of sites for this research project and I have to say that for a bunch of people who call themselves designers, there's an awful lot of garbage out there! I started my search from an older blog by Design Mag called 101 Awesome Portfolio Sites. Some of the sites they listed were really cool... but then when you navigated to the actual website, it had been changed. I understand. My own corporate identity has changed many times over the past several years, too. What bothered me were the websites that started off really cool, but then got changed to something totally sucky. Why oh why would they do that? Another example of the adage "If it ain't broke don't fix it"!

Another Video Edited By Yours Truly

Hello from the trenches of Interactive Multimedia!

It's almost another week down in the program, and I've managed to get another video project edited for A/V class. In this exercise we had to take some footage the class shot around Charlottetown in September and do some "creative editing" to it. I set my footage to a piece of music I found by Kevin Macleod who allows free use of his work as long as you credit him (which I have done!).

Although I like my end-result, I do have to say that working with a sound track in video production is really hard on the head! I've been listening to the same one minute clip of music for over 10 hours. I'm glad I chose not to use a piece of music I really liked because this project would have totally killed it for me!

Anyway, here's the video, in all its glory. ENJOY! :)

Video Editing is for the BIRDS!

Okay so I've been trying to "stay positive" when blogging, but every now and then even the most Polly-anna of us can crack...

I spent another 8 hours editing my video project for Thursday's class. I feel as if I've been pushing a very large rock up a very steep hill with my bare brain! But I got 'er done finally and loaded my baby up on to my Youtube channel for everybody to enjoy.

As with any project, this one had its share of challenges. Most of those challenges stemmed from my total lack of experience with the video camera and editing software. Also, I was not dealing with real actors. My solution: cover it all in cheese! Yesiree, everything tastes better with cheese! :)

In all, I am fairly pleased with how this video came out. Hopefully the next one won't cause so many eruptions of foul language from me as I sweat it out over the editing. New software and I are not easy friends... nope!