alan crissey / graphic designer » Website Building http://www.alancrissey.com A graphic designer in the Atlanta area, discussing anything and everything creative. Tue, 06 Oct 2009 04:00:28 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc en hourly 1 A New Year, A New Beginning http://www.alancrissey.com/archives/297 http://www.alancrissey.com/archives/297#comments Wed, 07 Jan 2009 07:14:50 +0000 Alan http://www.alancrissey.com/?p=297 Yes it’s cliché, but in this case, there is no other way to say it.

We all have something new that we vow to do for the new year. For some it’s to exercise more. Others may decide to start flossing. I decided it was time to leave my job of four years at an ad agency to freelance full time.

It may seem like a crazy decision. The economy isn’t doing so great and people are being laid off. But I felt that I needed to spread my wings a little bit. Freelancing is a challenge, but I feel up to it. I’ve got some new tools under my belt and some exciting projects coming up. And there’s nothing like working from home. This has been a dream of mine for a while, and I’m confident that I can make it work.

If you’ve been here before, you may have noticed that I’ve revamped the site, hopefully for the better. It started off as an experiment, inspired by Jason Santa Maria, who is promoting the idea of treating dynamic web content more like printed media. This is tough to do. Designing for the web has its own set of challenges that make this a lot harder than it sounds. I had a lot of other ideas that I’ve had to scrap for technical reasons and time constraints, and I may gradually add some of them. But I had to say enough was enough, and go ahead with the launch.

You might be wondering why this is necessary. The truth is that print, especially magazines and newspapers, are in the middle of a mass migration to the web. This is being accelerated by the current economy. So the challenge for us designers is to learn how to make this transition, and make it a good one.

Like I said, this site is a bit of an experiment. I’ve used some techniques that I’ve never used before, and it may not display correctly in Internet Explorer. I haven’t had a chance to test it yet. But the techniques and framework that I’ve implemented should allow me to create posts and pages that aren’t stuck in the traditional ‘post in left column, static links in right column’ layout. I can be a little more creative with the layout of my posts. So we’ll see where this goes.

]]> http://www.alancrissey.com/archives/297/feed 3 B.D. Andrews Photography http://www.alancrissey.com/archives/115 http://www.alancrissey.com/archives/115#comments Thu, 01 Jan 2009 16:34:09 +0000 Alan http://www.alancrissey.com/?p=115 What I enjoy most about my projects is what I learn from them.

My friend Brandon is an excellent photographer. I built a simple website for him a while back but it proved to be very difficult to add his photography projects. All image sizing and uploading had to be handled manually through several complicated steps, as well as updating the code and navigation. So when we were discussing adding a blog to his site, I decided it was worth the extra effort to solve the photo handling problem, since displaying his photography was the purpose of the site to begin with.

B.D. Andrews Photography Site

We wanted to keep the design simple, clean and elegant. This was to show off his photography, and any textures or graphical flourishes seemed to take away from the impact of his images. The home page was where we wanted to showcase some of Brandon’s best work, and a slideshow, which can be edited any time by Brandon, does just that. Through a clever use of plugins and programming, I was able to put together a system where Brandon can upload a set of images and, through a few easy steps, thumbnails and resized images are generated along with an embedded watermark of his logo.

Brandon is also an iPhone user, and because the site is built on WordPress, he can update the site and even add photos from his iPhone from anywhere. This project turned out to be a great example of how far the Web has come in terms of usability and functionality. I can’t wait to use what I have learned in future projects. The site is now live and you can visit at www.bdandrews.com.

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