• Belated Weeknotes. Sorry not sorry.
  • I’m on the lookout for a new gig klaxon! Possibly some freelance work or consulting, but I’m open to the right design position at the right place. As such, I’ve redesigned my portfolio. I say portfolio, but that’s not quite the right word is it? More like a bunch of case studies…
  • What is a portfolio anyway? In some ways I miss the purpose of a portfolio. It is a simple device to get your foot in the door. A way to start a conversation. I understand the criticism; that, how can you show a piece of work in a portfolio when being part of a whole team of people? How can a picture really speak a thousand words of a challenging client with complex needs? How can a screen grab demonstrate the methods by which you gained research insight? There’s a lot in there. But, here’s the thing, ‘traditional’ portfolios were never supposed to do that. They were an example your craft. You ability to execute.
  • But, anyway. I redesigned them. I wrote four case studies, and there are more to come. Have a read and let me know what you think.
  • I took the opportunity to sort out images on here too. They were largely enormous, terribly organised – as you’d expect from a blog that is 17 years old and has been through the following systems:
  • Just static HTML
  • Awful HTML thanks to Dreamweaver
  • Home grown php
  • Movabletype
  • Expression Engine
  • Wordpress
  • Statamic
  • And now… Eleventy.
  • There are a whole bunch of different ways these systems manage images and it was such a mess. In fact, what has substantially grown over the years was file size. I knew I needed to hook up Cloudinary to server decent responsive images. The slightly tricky thing was I have tons of legacy content where’d I’d converted all image refs to simple markdown links. Most of the Eleventy Cloudinary plugins deal with short codes for inserting the images. I needed one just for simple markdown. In steps Responsiver and this nifty demo from Nicolas.
  • As I use Netlify, this demo also had a useful example of writing a proxy request so that a single service is ‘seen’ by the server. Dead handy, that.
  • And now, I haven’t changed a single link, and all images are served responsively by Cloudinary. Still got to do some tweaks with the compression settings and sizing, but so far so good. Progress.
  • England won a football game. So that’s nice.
  • Last week, I also bought a VR headset in my ‘spend it before year end’ annual ‘investment’ in upgrading tech in the house. This was purely a treat though. I got some HP ones and they are incredible. So good, in fact, that whilst noodling around in Microsoft Flight Simulator – flying out of Cardiff airport and trying to find my house – I think I gave myself air sickness for a bit. It’ll take a bit of getting used to. Elite Horizons is ridiculously good though. Completely immersive, and it enhances gameplay enormously.