Tying up the loose ends for tomorrow, the big day!

the power of (homemade) print

Two of my tasks that I have been postponing until the last few weeks are ordering my business cards and refining my letterhead and envelope. My business cards are revised and now being shipped over the next week or so. 

As for task 2, I spent a good amount of time figuring out why my current letterhead and envelope weren't looking as great as what I'd hoped. Realizing that you can never go wrong with simplifying, I decided to start fresh and incorporate one of my clever ideas from a previous version of my letterhead, which played well with my logo. Only this time the logo is much larger! As you can see below, when printed out and put together, the letterhead and envelope are much easier to imagine for professional print, even though they are homemade!

what an expensive major?!

Over the past week, my greatest concern was purchasing everything I need for our class' portfolio review on time. When shopping online, it is very easy for me to click the "add to cart"button and loose track of my budget. So after a few hours of browsing through my favorite portfolios along with coupon code sites, I decided to seal the deal and order the Pina Zangaro Vista (11 X 17) at for an unbeatable price on Ebay.com with free shipping! I suggest you check this out because there is only 7 available. I chose the landscape orientation because I felt it would fit my arrangement of work as well as stand out from the portrait portfolios. As for other purchases to be made, I still need to print my business cards. I am considering using Moo.com or Tyco in New Haven, since they are local and affordable. Moo however, let's you create it yourself online and that is super convenient for my schedule. Decisions, decisions!

time never stops so why stop now? revisions...

Over the past few weeks, my attention has been on completing my portfolio site in Dreamweaver and revising and adding work to display in my gallery. I spent a good amount of time finding my projects from over my years as an IDD Student. Having to refresh my mind to programs I haven’t touched in months (like InDesign), I can expect to spend much more time revising these projects. I was only able to get through four of them and I can tell its probable I’ll need further revisions: David Proctor, Johnny Johnson, Living Well, and Remote Lock.

Since it’s difficult to envision what my portfolio site would look like with only placeholder images, part of my homework this week was to replace these sample images with my actual work. For navigation, I had scrapped the spry accordion navigation panel that I used last week and created rollover icons in Photoshop that I’ll keep working on for the remainder of the semester.

Aside from my website, another focus for the week was putting the final touches on my identity work, particularly my letterhead, and then printing them out (fronts and backs glued together) for review. In my spare time, I have browsed many online stores for portfolio presentation books, specifically Pina Zangaro, DickBlick, Utrecht, Itoya. This book’s style is one I can see working the best with the work I have to show but I’m still searching for the perfect one.

another week, another revision. : )

Portfolio Site Revisions


The direction I'm heading down with my design identity and portfolio site is okay, but as a designer, I feel as if I'm constantly changing my mind and considering different approaches. Truthfully, I possibly foresee myself making a drastic change from this direction, probably a more simpler look and feel because I myself like things simple.


This week I had made a good number of changes on my site since the previous version. Most things I had taken out just looked ridiculous upon second glimpse and I knew they just needed to go. As for progress on the site, I fixed the links for the images and logo on the home page(turns out a folder was deleted off my server) as well as adjusted the table and alignment of objects on my about page. I also explored a variety of free contact forms and ended up adding a foxyform to my contact page. It was the easiest to customize and install and I highly recommend it! Other forms I found that could work well are cloudcontactforms and wufooforms.

As for portfolio content, I still have to go through and make revisions to a lot of work, so I figured it'd be best to write up some draft descriptions to start and leave everything off the site for now. Good thing is I know what I want to use and what I don't. I have been working on a few other projects along with an app called "Hunger Hours" that I was hoping to add to the collection, but first needs review. I's assuming that if I keep working at a steady pace, then I should finish up with good time by the end of the semester (as well as probably still revising little things here and there).

Going digital... and CRAZY!!$&*^@

^                  click the t to visit my work in progress

I thought creating a personal logo was a challenge. After spending countless hours this week working on changing code, custom seamless backgrounds, finding just the right pixel for div placements, and basically relearning many of Dreamweaver’s functions, my portfolio site makes my logo’s process feel like a nice warm breeze. Much of my web developing process took a lot of experimenting. I had to preview a lot in Firefox and Safari to make sure everything was right and then go back to change small elements within the CSS and HTML code. I found myself commonly referring to W3Schools.com to look up things I forgot or to test something.

As far as future objectives, I still would like to figure out how to install a contact form and was considering Foxyform.com, Freecontactform.com, and Formlogix.com. Although I used these Social icons in the navigation of my site (from 40 Set), I was looking into Addthis.com for a custom Facebook Like/Twitter Share/Google Plus One button set to include on the right side of my logo. This way I can make it easier for others to help me promote myself. If it’s as simple as a click, then why not. My methodology for this site is simple design and efficiency with the style I’m using for my identity.

Updates to Business Card, Letterhead, Envelope, Cd and Cover:

Ohhh sometimes... I get a good feeling!

It’s a good feeling to finally see things coming together regarding my final designs for my logo, business card, letterhead, and envelope. I’ve decided that I want a digital portfolio on cd as well as online and in print, so I went ahead and designed a cd/cd cover. I got the idea after looking through designer template freebies from inkd, although none were very appealing to me.

After this week, I can finally appreciate how hard professional designers must work day-in, day-out. I definitely see myself developing my identity’s style, especially after sketching for my portfolio site with my logo’s round, curvy scribbled look in the back of my mind. There’s so much to consider when creating a website that I can predict it’s going to be a challenge to get all of my ideas to work as I hope. I have a color palette that I made with Adobe Color Lava that is very modern and stylish, especially for web. One concept I would like to implement in my site is color as an organizational device, such as the portfolio site of Skolos-Wedell. '92. '93. '94. The look I’m going for is grayish background with use of the grid pattern with a creative method of presenting my work, my navigation, and myself. In my research I’ve come across many designers (Chris Thurman, Mark Hobbs, Andrew Tebbott) that have a cool style that’s very similar to mine. They also have catchy phrases that bring viewers into their sites such as “I didn’t invent the internet, I just make it look better.” I was considering incorporating some kind of original, catchy phrase, such as “First name Tom, Last name Hammer, I am a Designer,” possibly using a handwriting effect in Adobe After Effects.

Research