My New Portfolio Site

MY NEW PORTFOLIO SITE

My new portfolio site is now online, which is super exciting :D It showcases my Print, Web, and Video design skills, as well as my skills in Illustration.

Despite what my professor suggested to me, I am going to continue to include my illustration work. I believe that, while the design work should be in the forefront, designers who have the skills to produce design and art through means OTHER than simply digitally become stronger candidates in the world of design. This theory was proven to me when applying to internships, where I was chosen by R-Design not only because I had strong designs, BUT also because my illustrations skills are equally strong.

I hope that you enjoy (though, if you are here, probably have seen my site already XD).

Site DONE

Moscato's Bella Cucina


 :)

Website almost done / Webblog

The website is almost done. We changed the background to make the cutting board look like it's on a granite countertop. Looking into how to put a dropshadow on a background image (because I have a background image ON a background image to achieve the sense of this cutting board on countertop. Just little tweaks here and there in the actual site to make it perfect :)

In other news, the blog style sheet is coming along nicely.

Not much to Report

Since I've already let you know all that's going on with the site... Thanksgiving was delicious and Tangled was an EXCELLENT movie; I highly recommend it. Oh, and Unstoppable was actually A LOT better than you would think it is judging from the trailer. :D

Cheers.

Alpha Testing

Well, things turned out pretty okay during alpha testing. Christie was nice enough to sacrifice her webspace for the time being so that we could test the site live on the web as opposed to simply being a local file on the hard drive. We wanted the real experience. Most things went without a hitch. I was most pleased that the jquery worked universally on both mac and pc.
DIV sizes need to be tweaked, as we want the site to NOT scroll when the viewer is at 1024x768. The site looks beautiful at 800x600, but when I look at it at a smaller resolution, I do 1024x768, because I see that as a minimum safe size for good resolution. Little things such as fixing the color of one of my links, and tweaking font sizes are among my chief concerns.
The two largest problems were found in Internet Explorer (because it's a garbage web browser). First off, the fonts refused to work on that. A solution to that is being explored at the moment. The biggest problem was in the form of some photos that simply would not show up in IE, the browser saying that the files did not exist while we were staring at them in firefox and on the mac. The problem ended up being in the color mode the pics were saved in. APPARENTLY, IE cannot handle CMYK photos. (I put this huge, so that you, my readers, who are more prone to glance than read, will know of this flaw.) Thanks to Phil's suggestion, I changed those to RGB, and BAM. All was fixed. As if nothing was ever wrong. STUPID BROWSER!

Anyhoo, home stretch! Can't wait for beta testing :)

Heading toward something tangible...

I'm probably going to encode another version of the site, with the other background. But for right now, here's what we have. Here's a sample of what we have.

Home Page

Menu opener

Menu page - Pasta and Pizza

Catering opener

Contact page

404

VOTE! (plz?)

Okay, so here's the thing kiddies. Angelica and I redid a photoshoot with a bunch of yummy foods. The effect we want is for food to hang over the cutting board and be able to make that it looks like its sitting on some sort of countertop. That wasn't practical with the original choice as the image was cropped, and most photos were like that. So, I experimented myself with the photoshop tool photomerge, using several photos from the shoot to try and expand the canvas a bit, and achieve the vision I had in mind. (Thank you Alexander Kusminov, for saving me hours of work).

However, We were better able to achieve the desired effect in the new shoot.
BUT! I'm not particularly ecstatic about the way it looks... A little too symmetrical and what not for my taste.
So, here, I'm holding it up to a vote to see what people think about the look. (Mentally envision the top one as the photomerge file).

(The white box represents the view of a 1024x768 window).

So, again, please vote which background has a generally better look please / would work better as a background.