Print Portfolio Done?

Actually, I feel like it's still a work in progress (which it is). I gotta keep adding to it and making it better, but for now this is a temporary fix.

Current Project: A Hardcopy of My Portfolio

So I've been trying to come up with a good design for a print portfolio. Up until this point, I've just been using an album-like portfolio to put print copies of my design in. Now I figured that designing an actual portfolio would be a better investment because it'll showcase my ability to design print materials and it's more personalized to fit my style. An album is just so lifeless. So without further ado, here is my work in progress. The only concern I have at this point is if it doesn't print out correctly, so fingers crossed that won't be too big of a problem.

New Portfolio!

So I finally decided to make a very important investment and purchased a legit domain. No more of the co.nr mess. I paid like $38 for a whole year of web hosting and got the domain for free at GoDaddy.com. Not too bad. Now you can Google my name and actually find my website on the first page (along with my Twitter and Facebook). It's alyssanguyen.com. Just so you know.

The whole redesigning of my portfolio took 3 days. This is what my old portfolio looked like:

Now it looks like this:

In case you're curious, my new design was inspired by the Nike Lebron X shoes in the "Canary" color. Looks like this: 

Yeah. I know some people don't like those shoes, but if I had money then I wouldn't mind getting those. They would be considerably heavier than my current shoes, the Adidas Crazy Shadows, though.

For those who don't know, I make my websites purely from HTML. It's what I'm most familiar with. So while it looks like what you see about now, for days it looked like this to me:

So much fun. I think my next investment now is to make myself some business cards. Or at least that's what my social media marketing professor is suggesting. Fingers crossed that my investments pay off and I can get a full time job. For now, I guess I'll just be a server at the Gaylord Texan Hotel. Oh yeah. I guess I forgot to mention that. I have a part-time job now! It's a seasonal job at the Gaylord Texan's Paradise Springs. It's basically like a Hawaiian Falls except for high class people. Let's hope this job gets me some good tips, unlike at freaking Studio Movie Grill. 

Attacking Catholics: Is This Something You Want to Include in Your Portfolio?

So I'm browsing through the graphic design tag on Tumblr when I come across this: a series of "posters" about pedophilia in Catholic churches:
http://overthewembo.tumblr.com/post/
32265987330/posters-about-pedophilia-in-catholic-churches

Okay. I'm about to go on this huge angry rant. Like, forreal. This  kind of stuff is not okay. Alright, I understand that the Catholic religion has been getting a lot of bad press because of child molestation charges against a few priests. But it's not like it's only happened to the Catholic church. I'm sure that there are some cases like this involving Baptist pastors. It's not like anyone is hating on Baptists. On top of that, is it really fair to attack a religion as a whole for the actions of a select few? People say it's insensitive to attack all Muslims for the actions of a few radicals that decided to carry out the September 11th attacks. Isn't it insensitive to do the same to Catholics?

ON TOP OF THAT, these images are a series done by a 24-year-old graphic designer to include in his portfolio. HIS PORTFOLIO. Really, is this something that you would want to include in your portfolio? Do you honestly think that your potential employers would find this a "tasteful" piece? I'm pretty sure that if this is the kind of aesthetics that you're into that you're going to have a hard time finding a job. These aren't even that cleverly done. Like, what the heck. All the guy did was throw in a few penises. The composition and the execution just suck. How long would it take to make all these "posters?" Probably less than 20 minutes. You know that kind of effort is going to land you a graphic design job.

Alright. End of my angry rant.

Finished my online portfolio!

Hooray! I've managed to complete my personal online portfolio! Oh my gosh. That took wayyy longer than I thought it would. When did I start? I think on Friday. And I just finished so that's about 4 days to build this site. I really do need to learn how to use Dreamweaver or something. Coding a website in pure HTML and CSS is the most tedious thing ever. The worst part for this project was including a lightbox for the graphic design and photography portion of the site. I've never used a lightbox before so I had to learn quickly how to implement jQuery and stuff like that. I guess this was a good learning process. At least I'll be satisfied with the layout of my site for a while and at least it sort of works across all browsers. I will forever hate Internet Explorer for making my life a living hell. My last layout was rather blah and it didn't appear correctly on Internet Explorer at all. Tien says that I should try using Blogger to build sites instead cuz it'll be easier to update. The only downside is that it's less customizable. Oh well. If you guys want to check out my portfolio, you can. I still haven't added any images to the photography section yet. I'll work on it later. I was more focused on the graphic design portion. But yeah!

Click to see my portfolio: http://ae221.co.nr (I'll try and get a more official domain later.)
Check out Tien's blog: http://hungrytien.com