The day I have waited months in anticipation for is finally here, Adobe CS5 is officially public. While it does not hit shelves until the 3rd of May, you can do what I did and download a copy of the entire Master Collection off of the Adobe website. You can use the demo for 30 days or enter a license once you have purchased it, no need to reinstall.
There are so many wonderful improvements in CS5 that I can’t even begin to scratch the surface. All of the programs run natively in 64 bit mode for one thing, making them far more responsive and able to render nearly all effects and filters in real time. Photoshop also added some amazing features like content aware fill , 3d brushes / paint mixing, and puppet warp. Plus Photoshop now has better built in HDR processing… which I just HAD to play around with first thing today. Below are some pictures I took downtown using multiple exposures and the new HDR features.
Even while quickly slapping together these photos I found all the new features greatly sped up my workflow. I can’t wait to dig into the rest of CS5′s Master Collection to see how my illustration, video editing, and audio editing workflows will be affected. Oh and just in case any of you missed out on the launch video, here it is. It covers quite a few of the new features in all of the programs included in the Master Collection.
So this is it, the new site has finally been launched! Many of you have been waiting a long time for any change to my site, let alone a complete remake. The old site was dated because it did not show my current web designing skills and no longer represented me the way I felt my online portfolio should. I started working on this revision of my site a couple months ago and have not looked back at my old site since.
Some of you might notice that new site resembles Apple.com, and you are correct. I took much of my inspiration from Apple because I like the style and minimalist look of their site and wanted to challenge myself to duplicate it as a study for future web development. By studying or replicating another artist’s work, one can learn new ways to think about their own methods, techniques, and workflows; I definitely learned a lot doing this project.
I wanted to give the site a more professional feel by not having my blog be the first page you see. The homepage now highlights one of my articles as the main content. I thought this would be a good way to direct people to a new piece of artwork or a important event in my life. Below that is a series of four smaller boxes that highlight four main categories of my blog, My Life (news form my personal life), My Work (new artwork or tutorials), My Freetime, (media reviews and gadgets), My Goodness (random articles or awesomeness).
The blog has become easier to use in a lot of different ways. The entire blog is now driven by ajax, which means much snappier loading of content without having to reload the entire site. The new search feature highlights the words you search for in the articles it returns. I have also added a blog navigation bar that can be used to filter the posts in my blog by their categories and dates. My sidebar now contains more dynamic information like my Facebook/Twitter status, recent Flickr pictures, my Pandora activity, and my latest run using Nike+. This way even if I don’t update my blog for a while, the content on my page never gets completely stale. I plan to add more sidebar features in the future as well.
The portfolio and résumé sections of my site have changed quite a bit as well. The static way my old portfolio was displayed drove me nuts, so I designed a much more interactive and colorful way to display my work. I also added descriptions and dates for the majority of my work to let people know more about it. My résumé was also in desperate need of some style, so I tried to add some color and even some humor by incorporating images into a new layout.
Anyway, enough talking… cruise around the site and let me know what you think. I will be adding more features and doing some tweaking over the next couples weeks so let me know if you run into any issues. Glad to be back!
Working on a few new characters at the moment. I will post more pics of new characters as the other models come along. Any crit and comments are more than welcome.
Here are some more shots from recent updates of projects. The first is the updated turtle shell with texturing almost complete. The second is a t-shirt design I started last night.
The past couple weeks I have been working on not only my artwork, but a business website as well. Working alongside my brother and his fiancé to create a website for their workplace has been a lot of fun. The thought behind the project was to make a simple and easy to use marketplace for selling the company’s pottery. I also needed to make it efficient, easy to operate and of course easy to update for people who did not know their way around html and css. It was fun teaching them how to use and update the site and we feel that this new site will make it much easier for them to reach markets that were not open to them before. Plus it is exciting that it has only been up for two days and people are already ordering. We are adding more products in the near future, so feel free to check it out* or even do some shopping!
* This site is no longer maintained by me and does not represent my quality of work.
