There's a lot of energy in the color orange. You need that to be in this industry! The color can also be a tranquil asset to a eye-catching sunset. In short, it was the perfect visual term to pair with "drum". "Drum" stems first from playing, but when coming up with the name, I also liked that it had double meaning. A "drum" full of oil, for example, can be thought of very strong solid, and more than likely, big. If you put the two together:
Orange Drum = a high-energy, never boring, tranquil asset, strong, solid, with nothing but big ideas... kinda website.
BEHIND THE SCENES
First, A Thank You
Thanks to the guidance of a certain Jorge Salazar, my knowledge of Object Oriented programming has gotten me the working site you see before you. If I waited for my head to wrap around things on my own, you'd be clicking through a Flickr gallery right now.
So, a big thank you to Mr.Salazar for the visual aids, long hours, and answers to my many many stupid questions.
The Drawing Board
There wasn't a whole lot I knew about programming other than the basics of front end HTML and CSS at the designing stage of this site. I knew I needed to learn ActionScript 3.0 eventually, though, and thought this would be the ideal time to break the code, if you will. So I studied up a little before actually taking pencil to paper this time. I knew I wanted a character to "walk" you through the site. I also knew I didn't want the entire site based in flash.
From this bore "Orange" which is our little orange friend munching on the drum we see around the site. It also brought me to the gallery which is only 650px * 500px. An ideal size for dynamic flash. In the end I realized I had ActionScript 3.0 to learn and I had to learn XML if I wanted my portfolio dynamic and easy to update. I also needed to figure out a way to have Flash call XML into the HTML as well as create a basic form. CSS also supplied a few obsticles with sticky footers to static placed divs all needing to be as compatible as I am capable of making them. Languages needed:
- HTML
- CSS
- XML
- ActionScript 3.0
- JavaScript
- PHP
Practice AS 3.0 Projects
There are a lot of these and more will inevitably follow if I want to really grasp these Object Oriented techniques.
This one, being my first ever, instainiates movieClips and assigns them with EventListeners that enable them to "catch" calls from the mouse events that happen when you click any of the arrows or yellow circle. There's also a text field that will load text if any of the top three buttons are pushed.
I wanted to use this example because I coded this all in a single frame of the fla rather than setting up file structure, packages, and establishing a base class for the actions to be initiated from. I think you can gather I understand how that works just based on this site alone.
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Promo Piece
This is the original sketch for the dog tags that work as my business cards. Pricey, yet entirely worth it, they no doubt added that momento for people to take away from my site, projects, and portfolio.
But this clever number also has a much more important job being that it is part of my "Promo Piece". This could be anything the designer builds in attempts to catch your eye, entice you to his site, and in the end, land the interview. If you are interested in my services, feel free to contact me to request one.
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