Finally complete… almost

I owe cookiecrook far more than anyone could guess. Without his urging, I wouldn’t be on the AIGA Austin board right now. I also wouldn’t even be aware of accessibility and how important it truly is for web design.

I also wouldn’t have learned about the Lightbox script. It’s a nifty lightweight javascript for popping up an image within your current browser window. Say you have a thumbnail image that you want to be clickable to show the image full-size? Opening the image in a new window is counter-intuitive for getting back to the original window. Lightbox script solves that.

Even as James clued me into the script, the author of said script had just produced version two. After evaluating it for a few days, I decided to stick with version one. I felt that the newer script in, all its animated spiffiness, was detracting from the image itself (which to me is the antithesis of its purpose).

So the build-up to all of this is that I’ve finally completed the last leg of my site redesign: having larger previews of my portfolio samples. The only ones that are link-dead are old websites from the pre-dot.com-bust days and print samples that I no longer have originals of (a hard drive crash and misplacing a box of portfolio samples from moving six times within three years will do that). It’s something I still have difficulty discussing.

So now the very last thing I’m contemplating for my site is the gray-to-gray that I have going on with the background and the sidebar. It looks okay on a PC but my eyes get lost in the sea of gray that Safari displays. I’ve thought about placing a pattern in the background, but who isn’t doing that these days? But I like it, so I may still end up trying it out.