My Portfolio Website (Updated January 5)

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
#1

I’ve been working on this nonstop for the past 3 days (minus eating some turkey). It’s been pretty fun. This project has really gotten me to learn some actionscript (which is also why it took so long). The past day has been nothing but optimizing the coding to make it run better. If you see any bugs, let me know. Don’t complain about the mystery meat either, I don’t think it’s an issue.

UPDATE:
Once again, I’ve started the project from scratch. It is visually almost the same, but the coding is from the ground up. This has been a great learning experience. A couple things moved around too. Plus the url is much shorter now.

http://www.michaelthao.com

#2

It’s a snazzy little site you have there, the design is also clean and effective, so well done.

Some niggles: The shapes on the front page look a bit sparse and basic. You should try adding a bit of eyecandy instead of having solid colour like that.

Second thing is how do you make your gallery extensible when you need to add more images? This is one of my major issues with flash design. It looks very impressive, sure, but it can be a nightmare if you come back two years down the line to add new content.

------edit----------

Forgot to mention, that motorbike made my eyes go: :o

#3

Thanks for the compliments.

You don’t add to your (student) portfolio, you change it. The weakest pieces go out and the strongest pieces stay. You are only as good as your weakest piece. I think I will change the “contact” button to more work later or add another layer of depth to the buttons. I’ve heard from many sources that 10 - 15 pieces in your portfolio is the way to go.

I added cropped work on the main page for a while, but it messed up the composition (which is strange and non-traditional as it is, but somehow works). And yeah, the site looks simple, but man there’s a lot more coding than you’d expect.

#4

Nice, simple, clean design. I like it!
I am a programmer by trade and noticed a couple of qwirks…
Fisrt the pie peices ‘wig out’ if the cursor is positioned between the initial and slid out positions. This can be remedied with a time delay before it returns to its original position.
Second I noticed that a color would suddenly appear under the pie peices and stay there. I am not totally sure if this was intended or if it is an issue. It seemed to be a random occurance.
Anyhow, keep it up, it looks great!

#5

I agree with you. I think you are as good as your best piece but having crappy stuff takes you down a bit because people won’t think you are consistently good.

I absolutely loved the design. It was fluid, intuitive and unlike a lot of flash site, didn’t take ages to load every part. I went right through the site in about 5 minutes. Awesome work.

By far, this is one of the best flash sites and indeed portfolio sites I’ve ever seen.

#6

I noticed that first problem, but couldn’t think of a solution. The one you are proposing will cause one problem: if the user moves his mouse out of the active area, the button will stay in it rolled over state. So it’ll be stuck there until they move back over and roll out. I just came up with a good solution though, add an invisible dummy quarter circle graphic into the button movie that stays in the original position.

I’ve also experienced the second problem and can’t figure out what is happening. It seems to occur more often when you’re quickly running through the site.

Thanks for the compliments. I completely overhauled the code and optimized it the best I can so that it would be quick. Everything loads in the beginning because I didn’t want people to wait in the middle.

Did anyone find backtracking the site difficult? Or get lost when browsing the pages?

#7

“Wig out” problem fixed via dummy movies (it only took like 5 minutes with no change to code either). I was about to settle and let it just be that way too. Thanks for making me take a second look radrevere.

#8

Took another look…That fix makes a HUGE difference! The whole thing feels much smoother and looks more professional. You’re welcome!

#9

Updated

#10

quite nice!

i got through the entire thing, it is quite intuitive for having no labels on the buttons.

now you just have to figure out how to fit more work into your portfolio!

#11

your site is very intuitive that’s cool

some things to change maybe :
be able to click on your email adress and have mailto link when in the contact section
also, be able to kick the contact screen back to the general by clicking on it (but not on your email adress), the same way you had done for kicking images to go to the previous sections…

Your name on the left handside and at the bottom right should be clickable to lead either to a mailto or to your contact section/menu (the black disc), (and then one should be able to kick that section back to section one was in before clicking on your name).

Maybe you could give more sound effects when clicking (it seems that you had only one which was played when moving the mouse over a section proposal in the general menu).

Jonathan