Teaching is hard work. It’s not necessarily hard work in the physical sense, but the mental gymnastics required to teach something complex involves more understanding and effort than most human beings are willing to put in. Which is why there are so few truly good teachers in the World.

Part of the problem is students demanding and teachers attempting to “make it simple”. This one folly has created more clueless teachers and students than anything else in human history. The fact of the matter is, most things just aren’t very simple; they can be easy, but rarely simple.

There’s a lot of material out there that masquerades as simple instruction, any number of ready-reckoner resources, and entire series of books for dummies come to mind. Like the vintage drawing instruction card shown above, they are certainly instructional, and perhaps even simple, but the important question to ask is, do you learn how to draw an elephant by looking at that card? If the aim is to truly understand a thing, simple instructions are often deceptive.

Three Blind Men

To explain why they’re deceptive, let me tell you an old story about some blind men. Three blind men came across an obstacle on the road as they were tapping themselves along with their walking sticks, near their village. They decided to investigate, and spread out exploring the perimeter of the large object in their way. One held out his hand to feel a fibrous strand of something hanging down towards the ground and reported to the others that he had found a length of rope. The second was faced with what felt like immovable columns of stone, so he shouted out to his friends that he had found some pillars on the road which he was quite sure had never been there before. The two were now curious as to what their third comrade had found. The man held out his arm and was startled to feel a fleshy, muscular form coiling around his arm. “Snake!”, he screamed. Spooked by the noise, the rope lashed, the pillars rumbled, and the the three men scrambled back down the path imagining the horrific amalgam beast that they had just encountered along their village road. The elephant they had been groping before they darted off screaming, was quite taken aback by their behaviour too.

The Perils of Simplification

That story shows many of the inherent mistakes we make when trying to teach someone, but the blind men’s major shortcoming was in not being able to see how the various separate pieces fit together. If they could see the relationship between the simple pieces, they would have understood that it was an elephant; They were blind, not stupid.

The same can be said of anyone learning something new. Simple instructions break complex concepts and processes down into convenient, but artificial pieces for easy digestion. Unfortunately, important bits are often lost in translation. A student might be blind to the facts, but they aren’t stupid. Show them the big picture, and they can begin to grasp even the most complex of things, because nothing can be reduced to discrete simplified nuggets without losing an understanding of how these nuggets relate to each other and everything else. That in between, that thinking between the steps is what true understanding is all about.

Teachers of every kind, from someone standing in front of hundreds in a lecture hall, to someone answering a question on the internet, all sometimes forget that the process of instruction is not about them. Instruction is actually about the student. It’s about the teacher walking in the student’s shoes and answering those questions which the student doesn’t even know to ask yet.

Instruction is about anticipating the issues facing someone who doesn’t know what you know. It isn’t about breaking things down into the simple, but rather about building things up into the complex.

Samir

A stumbling block most face when considering a web portfolio is that they are unfamiliar with the technologies involved. Learning HTML code to make a portfolio is not most people’s idea of fun, not to mention the efforts and adjustments involved in resizing and saving all your images into the proper formats for quick viewing online. What follows is a short cut, an easy way to get a very respectable looking HTML based portfolio to put on your own web space online, or to just give people on a CD, without any web design or programming skills.

At a basic level, a website is a bunch of folders and sub-folders containing HTML files and JPG, GIF or PNG images. These work together to form the web site. To create a web portfolio, you need to make a similar collection of HTML files for the pages and JPG images for your work. The difference is that I’m going to show you how to use software to automate all the difficult stuff.

Tools

The most time consuming part of creating an HTML portfolio is the process of resizing all the images down to an even format for your site. That, combined with the time required to manually create thumbnails for the images, and make separate gallery pages for each project and section can be a cumbersome and repetitive process.

The solution is to get your computer to do all the donkey’s work for us. This is why you need to download Jalbum from http://jalbum.net

Jalbum is an automated HTML gallery creator. You point it to a directory containing images, adjust a few settings, and it will do all the hard work of resizing images, creating thumbnails, and creating the pages and the links between them. Once you download the file for this software, install it on your computer by running it. If you don’t have the JAVA runtimes installed on your system (Jalbum will show you an error when you try to run it if you don’t have these), you will need to download and install the appropriate version from http://www.java.com/getjava/

Jalbum is available on all major operating systems. While I’m writing these instruction using a Windows computer, the instructions should still work for Linux or Mac. As long as you have some basic knowledge of using your particular system, this should be easy to follow. This tutorial is based on Jalbum version 8.6. Barring major changes in future versions, this should all work as described here.

Preparing Your Work

Before you proceed with creating the portfolio files you need to make some preparations. Every good portfolio needs some well selected and organised work to display and your first task is to organise the images of your work into categories and under specific projects for the Jalbum software to work on.

The way you can do this is by using folders on your computer. For example, if you were trying to start a lucrative career in paper-folding, you could organise images of your work in this way:

Samir's Origami Portfolio
    - Origami Nature
    - Origami Boats
          - Gondola
	  - Double Boat
	        - double-boat-01.jpg
		- double-boat-02.jpg

“Samir’s Origami Portfolio” is the main directory, which contains sub-directories that are the categories, “Origami Nature”, “Origami Boats” etc. The categories then have folders for each project, eg.- “Double Boat”. And the project folder contains images that need to be displayed on a single page as part of that project (the JPG files in our example).

Make sure all the images are rotated to be the right side up. You don’t need to worry about image sizes yet. Just include whatever large version you have in the directories and Jalbum will take care of resizing everything down to an even size.

Making a Web Portfolio Step-by-Step

1. Start up

Let’s get started with creating your site. First you should start up Jalbum. You can switch off the “Sign-In” box that opens by default to proceed. You don’t need to sign-in to use the software the way we are going to. Once it’s open, click on the “Add” button in the top bar (the one with the + icon).

2. Adding images

A window that says “Add images or folders to the album” opens. In that window you need to choose your main work folder for Jalbum to look at. Find the folder you prepared earlier, and double click on the folder without clicking on any files inside it. In our example above, once you double click on the folder, the “File Name:” box should read something like “D:\Samir’s Origami Portfolio” if you have kept it on the D: drive. Click the “Add” button at the bottom to let Jalbum look at your images.

3. Gallery structure

Your directory structure should now appear inside the Jalbum window in the left pane, with the main category folders displayed in the right pane, just like it would when you look at it through Windows Explorer or My Computer. If you click on the category folders in the left pane, the right pane will display sub-folders and image thumbnails.

4. Saving the project

At this point, before adding more details into our portfolio, it might be a good idea to save the “project” within Jalbum so that all your settings are safe an can be reused later, in case you want to add or subtract work from your portfolio. Using the “Save album project as…” option in the File menu, save the project file in a safe place, away from the directories you created for your portfolio images, to avoid confusion. As you work through the steps that follow, make sure to save the file often to backup all the settings and description added to your portfolio project.

5. Adding descriptions

Now let’s add some descriptions. Click on your main folder in the left pane. Move your mouse over one of your category folders in the right pane. An option to “Edit” appears, click on it. This brings up “Edit Mode”, which looks like the screen shot above. In this window you can enter a caption or comment that gets displayed when the album HTML pages are created. You can use the Back(<) and Next(>) buttons to cycle through all the folders/files at the same level, and enter their descriptions.

6. Commented items

The commented folders will display a small speech bubble icon over the folder icon, so you know which ones have no description. Similarly, you can navigate through all the folders and images within Jalbum, and add in descriptions using the Edit Mode.

7. Skins and styles

Now you need to decide on a look for the gallery pages. Click on the drop-down menu next to “Skin” in the left pane. As you go over the options a small thumbnail display will show you how each “skin” looks. You can try the various options, but what I’m showing you is based on the options available for the Chameleon skin, which is the default choice. Chameleon provides a nice clean interface and displays all the descriptions you have entered properly. Be warned that all the skins do not display the descriptions, which could be a problem. You can use the “Style” drop-down to choose from various colour variations of the main skin. This way you can still customise the preset look into something that fits what you like.

8. Album settings

It is now time to adjust some settings to tell Jalbum how we would like it to create the HTML gallery pages. Click on the “Settings” under the “Album” menu. A window called “Album Settings” opens. In the “General” tab you can choose where the software should create the final site structure, by clicking on “Change directory locations”. For this I suggest you create a new blank folder somewhere, and then use the browse folder icon next to “Output directory” to choose that folder. It should finally read something like “D:/PortfolioFinalSite”. make sure you keep the output folder separate from the folder of your original images to avoid confusion and the loss of any files.

9. Page settings

In the “Pages” tab, you can choose the layout of the thumbnails, ie- how many columns and rows, and in what order they appear. When in doubt, leave the default settings alone. You can always experiment later once you get the basics.

10. Image settings

In the “Images” tab of “Album Settings”, you can choose the thumbnail size and the large image size in the final site. 160×160 for thumbnails and 800×600 for images are good general settings, but feel free to play around with other options if you wish.

11. Personalising your portfolio

Last but not the least, it’s time to add some general information about you to this portfolio to make it more than just an album of images. Since you’ve chosen the Chameleon skin in a previous step, there should be a “Chameleon” tab in the “Album Settings” window, which lets you change a gigantic list of settings allowed by this particular skin, in a series of 13 sub-tabs. Ignore the rest for now and click on the “Header/Footer” sub-tab.

In the Index Page > Header box, add in all the basic information you want as introduction to your portfolio. This will appear on the first page of your site, and tick the “Only at top level” box next to header to make sure the information isn’t repeated on every page. I would suggest your name, a short description about your work and talents, some contact information including email and telephone number, and a sentence or two that describes your portfolio gallery which will appear as thumbnails below.

One issue to keep in mind is that all the text will appear on a single line by default. To produce proper formatting and leave blank lines between information, use the HTML break tag. If you don’t know what that is, just insert <br /> for a new line, and two of them to leave a blank line.

In the Index Page > Footer and the Slide Page > Footer boxes, you can add any copyright notices you want to, and they will then appear at the bottom of every page like in most sites.

12. Final touches

Some more small touches than might help. Under the Chameleon tab switch off these: “Show total number of images” and “Show last update” under the “Album info” sub-tab, and “Download icon” under the “Images” sub-tab. You can ignore the other settings and tabs for the basic setup, and click on the “Close” button to exit the album settings window.

13. Generating the HTML site

You have been saving the project regularly, I hope? Do so now to to backup your settings. Now it is time to let Jalbum work its magic. Click on the “Make Jalbum” button in the left pane. A window called “Making album” appears, which contains a progress bar. It will take anywhere from a few seconds to many minutes for Jalbum to look through all the directories, resize the images, and create all the gallery pages, depending on the number of images and their sizes.

14. Testing your HTML portfolio

Once the process is “Done”, you can click on the “Preview” button to display the newly generated album site in your browser. Depending on the particular “Style” you selected in an earlier step, it should look something like the screenshot above. You can also have a look at the site by going to the output folder you set earlier and double-clicking on the newly generated “index.html” file there. You should now have a clean and well laid out site, with category albums, project pages, and images that can be browsed through with individual descriptions (if you put them in). A live demo of the example shown can be seen here.

15. Distributing your HTML portfolio

You now have a working HTML web portfolio. This includes all the files and folders inside your “Output folder”. You can simply burn all these files and folders on to a CD to distribute it that way, or upload all of them online(using FTP) to create a live website. That is beyond the scope of these instructions, but it can be done with a little work, and you will find plenty of instructions on the net.

16. Next steps

Now it’s up to you to do the rest and keep your HTML portfolio updated. Also make sure you browse through the web pages yourself. You need to be familiar with the way the site works if you are going to ever use the site to present your work to others. Enjoy your new electronic portfolio!

If you want to learn more or do more complex things with this in the future, I suggest you get to know Jalbum better. The Jalbum support page will help: http://jalbum.net/help

That’s a wrap! I hope you found this tutorial useful. If you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to leave a message below.

Best of luck,

Samir

People have been paying me to design things for over a decade now. During the first few years of this adventure, I visited clients with my printed portfolio in hand, my book, as the people in advertising would call it. As design work diversified beyond print, and computers and the internet became ubiquitous in every home and office, I stopped carrying around that little folder of designs. A digital portfolio was the way forward, not because it was the cool new thing to do, but because it simply made more sense.

As the artist’s and designer’s portfolio of work has moved into the digital realm, there has also been an on going evolution of what a portfolio needs to be and do. With the variety of technology, structure and style at your disposal, creating a digital showcase of your work is not as straight forward as sticking a few sheets into a folder any more. But, what we might have lost in simplicity we have gained in convenience and capability, so here is an overview of digital portfolios for you, the creative animal.

The old portfolio monologue

Before we dive into the specific choices involved in creating a digital portfolio, let’s take a quick recap of the portfolio that was, to better understand what has changed. In the old days (a decade ago) you had almost total control over how your work was presented and how it would be seen. Back then your portfolio was a lecture you were laying down on the wiling, and sometimes not so willing, audience, your clients and your peers. There was little they could do about it other than to nod or leave. Sure, there could have been the odd dissenting voice who booed you when you showed that particularly bad piece in the middle of your performance, but largely it was your show, and what others said of you mattered less.

The new portfolio conversation

Since the birth of the internet, what others have to say now matters a lot more. Not because others have suddenly become more knowledgeable about your craft, or because thy are all now more important, but because anything they say about you or your work, anywhere on-line, sticks around forever for anyone to find. That changes everything. You can’t continue giving your boring lectures and hope for the audience to keep quiet any more.

The new portfolio is not just your book, it’s not just that careful collection of material you’ve pruned and tended to like a artful gardener over the years. Your new digital portfolio is a many headed hydra that will grow new heads if you try to cut them off. In stead, befriend the beast and make the most of it, because your new digital portfolio is chatty, and you might as well include yourself in the conversation.

Digital Portfolio Formats

Every day the possibilities for what your portfolio could look like, or how you present it, keeps expanding with the march of technology. But let’s narrow things down to some universal basics. If you’re a creative person and your work can be represented in visuals of any sort, there are generally three possible formats your digital portfolio can take:

1. Executable Portfolios
2. PDF Portlios
3. Website Portfolios

Executable Portfolios

Your portfolio could be packaged into its own piece of software, its own little self-running programme that you can double click on and run on a computer. On the PC it would have an extension of .EXE. These sort of multimedia portfolios were very popular when computers first started getting powerful enough to handle high-quality graphics and sound, and before the advent of the internet as a significant force.

Back then these would be stuck on to CDs as animated presentations made in Macromedia Director or some other multimedia software. You will still find these today, as corporate presentations on publicity CDs, digital brochures on fancy DVDs, or as the interface on magazine cover discs. Today the weapon of choice is often Flash, which can also spit out an executable programme in addition to its other on-line output formats.

Do I recommend this way of creating a digital portfolio? The short answer is no, and there are various reasons why you don’t want an executable portfolio:

1. Executable files are usually specific to a particular operating system. One made for a PC will not run on a Mac, Linux, iPhone or other smart-phones, and vice-versa. In a world where the number of different devices and systems we all use to look at digital content is increasing all the time, forcing the viewer to use only one is not a good idea.
2. Executable files are a computer virus’s best friend. Viruses spread by attaching themselves to executable files, because they have real code to latch on to, which can be hijacked to cause havoc on your computer. It’s because of this that the idea of putting an executable portfolio on-line for download is also not a good one. Most people will avoid it, and their virus checkers will throw out a million warnings when they try to get at your portfolio. Do you like the prospect of your portfolio wrecking havoc on a potential client or employer’s systems? I don’t think so.
3. Executable portfolios are more difficult to maintain. Like the old print portfolio that took some extra effort to update, the executable file portfolio usually requires you to make updates within the software you originally created it in (say Flash), and then export new versions of the files to be put on new version of your CD or DVD to give people.

So, I would stay away from executable portfolios unless you have some very strong reasons for selecting one.

PDF Portfolios

Since executable files are a bad idea, your digital portfolio could be presented as various different document or media formats, but the one with the most universal appeal has to be Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF). It’s a single file that can contain multiple pages, very much like the old days of physical portfolio books. It’s also readable across operating systems and platforms, and even on some mobile phones, which makes it very flexible to work with. Best of all is that you can create a PDF file using any of the word-processing or presentation software you are familiar with without having to pick up many new skills.

How to create a PDF portfolio

It comes down to two main options. You can either use familiar office software to create your document and then export it to a PDF file, or you can use a dedicated design software which will often come with more elaborate features and the ability to spit out a PDF document.

1. PDFs from Office Software

   Whatever knowledge you have of using Microsoft Word, or PowerPoint, is usually enough to throw together a decent looking portfolio document, using all the images and information you need. Then it comes down to creating a PDF version of this digital book. The simplest way is to use a PDF creator/exporter software. What this does is behave like a virtual printer. Once the software is installed, you print your document and choose the virtual printer as your printer rather than the physical one you have on your desktop. It asks for a file name, and as long as page sizes and other settings were correct, you end up with a nice new PDF file. A great way to package your portfolio.

   There are literally hundreds of PDF creators out there, I suggest the free and simple PdfCreator. You can find the software and usage instruction at http://www.pdfforge.org

   If you want to make things even simpler, I highly recommend OpenOffice.org, available at the obvious http://www.openoffice.org. It’s a free and open source office software suite which has a fair amount of compatibility with Microsoft Office formats. It comes with it’s own equivalents of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and even a very admirable vector graphics and diagramming software called Draw. What makes this easier is that all parts of this suite can export to PDF without any additional software. A great convenience to have. I use it for all my invoicing and documents.

2. PDF from Design Software

   If you want to get more elaborate with the design of your portfolio, and if you’re a graphic or web designer, it’s possible some of the more professional design software you have already allows you to create PDF files. They will also have many advanced graphic features to add that extra visual finesse that may not be possible with your office software. Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, QuarkXpress and many others will let you export to PDFs in most cases, but versions and packages vary in their features, so I’d check to confirm.

   Desktop publishing and page layout software is ideally suited to PDF document creation because it allows for so much more control over the document, and saves you time with style sheets, master pages and other niceties. I personally use the open source Scribus, available at http://www.scribus.net. It’s a great piece of page layout software with everything you’d need to setup complex layouts; I’ve used it to produce magazines for years. If you’d like to make a fancy PDF and are willing to put in the time to learn a professional level page layout package, Scribus is the way to go.

The PDF Advantage

I’ve already told you how PDF files can be read across a variety of platforms. In a similar vein, a major advantage to PDF files is that they are equally comfortable both on-line and off-line. PDF files can easily be put on to CD or other disc to give clients, but if they are small enough, they can just as easily be emailed, or even stuck on a website. If your computer has the appropriate Adobe Acrobat Reader installed, your browser will often open up PDF files on websites and display them within the browser window, almost like a regular web page. This flexibility is a great feature of PDF when it comes to digital portfolios.

Website Portfolios

HTML, the basic document format that makes up websites, has almost all the benefits of a PDF document while being even more universal. Every computer may or may not have a PDF reader, but you can be certain almost every computer or device you come across now has some sort of web browser. As long as you have a web browser, you can look at your HTML based portfolio. When done right, your HTML portfolio can just as easily be put on to a CD for distribution, as it can be put on-line to be accessible by everyone 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. Imagine the power of that. We’ve gone from a book that you had to carry around with you to client meetings to a format that people from all around the world can see even if you’ve never heard of them.

There are really two major types of website or HTML portfolios you need to consider. A static website, or a dynamic system.

Static HTML Portfolios

Static HTML portfolios are very much like PDF portfolios in that they are just a bunch of pages and images that are meant to display your work. They cannot do much on their own other than display what you have laid out. That can be a good thing because it is the static sort of website portfolio that can work off-line on a CD, if that is a requirement.

Like PDF files, there are special software packages to create HTML pages and sites. One simple one you can try your hand at, without needing to be a web designer or a HTML coder, is KompoZer at http://kompozer.net. This used to be part of the Netscape browser and shares a lot of DNA with the popular Mozilla Firefox browser. KompoZer acts as a HTML creator and behaves very much like a word processor. You type in text, insert images, create links and you can then save an HTML page. You can even create entire sites by linking the various pages together. It takes some getting used to to think of documents as connected in this way, but it really isn’t all that hard once you try it out.

Another possibility to create static HTML portfolios for visual heavy work is to use one of the several HTML gallery creators to create thumbnails and album pages for the collection of images of your work. Some image browsing programmes already come with this ability, but how elaborate a page they produce can vary. A wonderful piece of software that really makes this process simple is JAlbum at http://jalbum.net. This software lets you organise your images into a structure and then spits out fairly accomplished looking gallery sites in HTML, which serve very well as web or CD based HTML portfolios.

Dynamic Web Portfolios

If you’re looking for a long term solution to maintaining an on-line portfolio, without having to recreate the entire thing and upload it every time you update your work, you need to look into Content Management Systems. CMSs are actually simpler than they sound. A CMS is a piece of software that sits on your web server, where your web site is hosted, and lets you make changes and add material to your website simply by logging in from within your browser. Think of it as being very similar to logging into your GMail, Yahoo or Hotmail account, and adding a new message. Only in this case you can make changes to your website, and the changes are immediately visible to the entire world. Now that’s the ultimate portfolio convenience.

A popular kind of CMS system is a blog (like what you’re reading now), which most people today are familiar with. If you’re looking to set up your own portfolio and blog, look no further than WordPress at http://wordpress.org. This is the most popular blogging software and for good reason. It’s easy to use once you learn the basics, it has millions of people who use it on a daily basis, so there’s plenty of help available, and it has hundreds of plug-ins that can make your WordPress blog or web site do pretty much anything you can imagine.

Creating a dynamic web portfolio if you are completely ignorant about web technologies is not something I’d recommend, but if you’re not afraid to tinker and have web designer friends you can turn to for advice when you need it, it’s a great thing to learn. Your infinitely updateable web portfolio will thank you for it.

Your On-line Presence

I’ve already touched upon how the internet has destroyed the idea of your well crafted portfolio being the only source of information about you and your work. Today, people get an impression of you by much more than that. Put in your name into Google and do what they call a vanity search. What do you see? If you have a very common name, most likely you won’t see anything about yourself at all, but just some other guy or girl who happens to share your name. If you’re lucky enough to show up on the first page of Google for your name, is that a good thing? What shows up first? A nice professional web site with your name on it? Or is it a gallery of mad photos put up by your friends after that party, or a really bad joke you shared on that on-line forum you have stopped frequenting for years now? Anything is possible, because most things on the internet last forever.

This is why making a digital portfolio in today’s reality is not just about choosing a format and sticking your work into it. It’s about inserting yourself into that conversation about you that’s already going on out there on the world wide web, and possibly controlling that conversation to say what you’d like to say about yourself. If you want to be know for your deep thought on your subject of interest, make sure you share some of these thoughts on your blog, on other websites, in comments on forums, on Facebook. Anywhere where people of similar interests exist on-line is a place to make your mark.

People don’t just wait for a look at your portfolio any more, I certainly don’t. They search the internet, they look on Facebook, they follow you on Twitter, they browse your Flickr photos. There are a million places most of us are on-line today, and all those places are potential things that the people you want to talk to or work with will be looking at. If you’re not OK with these people reading your juvenile jokes about farm animals, make sure you don’t make those jokes on the internet, and if you do, definitely don’t make them using your official account with your name on it.

Be aware that every thing you do on-line that has your name on it, IS part of your digital portfolio. Very often people will find those things before they see your well presented work, or they might see them after. Either way, it is a major factor in how seriously or otherwise they take you, so make sure you take it seriously. Does this mean you need to be boring and afraid on-line? No, but know that what you do is public and don’t do anything which you’re not OK with your friends, clients and peers knowing about. For things you’d like to keep private, have separate personal accounts on-line and don’t use your full name!

Know What You Want

This really is just a overview of what you need to consider when making a digital portfolio. Specific decisions and methods will vary wildly depending on what you do, and how you want to present yourself and your work.

I can’t remember where I read this, but it seems like an appropriate model to follow when thinking about a strategy for your digital portfolio and how to choose the right way and the right mood. It’s called the KFC method and consists of three steps indicated by the acronym:

1. Know what you want.
2. Find out what you’re getting.
3. Change what you’re doing to get what you want.

Know what you want your portfolio to get you. What is the job you’re after, or what is the kind of work your looking for, or what are the kind of people you’re targeting? Let those choices decide what type of portfolio you make. Are you trying to get to a client who is fairly low-tech and not website savvy? Maybe an emailed PDF file would work. Are you trying to impress the very web savvy crowd? Perhaps you should pay extra attention to your presence on Twitter and Facebook, and the state of your website. Let your goal make the choices for you, and keep re-evaluating because there isn’t always one right answer. If you’re not getting the kind of responses or interest you want, change what you’re doing.

Portfolios are as much a personal art as they are a science. There is only so much you can predict about the effect your portfolio will have in getting you where you want to go, but with the digital portfolio, adapting to changes and re-inventing yourself for new opportunities is now easier, and even expected. Just make sure you keep your ears open, the conversation going, and you’ll be the talk of the town soon enough.

Samir

This is based on a presentation I gave some final year Interior Design students a few years ago at my old University.

A good personal business card or visiting card is an invaluable thing to have. If your a designer, writer or independent weirdo of any sort, I’d say it’s absolutely essential. Whether you like it or not, telling most people you’re a freelance anything is tantamount to telling them you are jobless and destitute. The number of people who reply to “I freelance” with a sympathetic “That’s ok” is not funny.

Hand them a business card and maybe they won’t give you unsolicited career advice, and maybe actually remember you. In case you haven’t realised it yet, most people don’t remember you for ‘you’, they just remember what job you’re in. You’re usually that guy who works for XYZ, or that girl who’s into ABC. So, that guy who’s jobless is unlikely to stick. I don’t make these rules, I just read them as I see them.

When I started freelancing I was still studying. Most work came in through direct personal contacts, for whom business cards were unnecessary. As I started working with friends of friends, the need became more apparent. Thankfully, one of my final year classes was about the professional practice of design, and creating your own business card was one of the projects. That’s how I ended up with my very first personal business card.

Origami Business Card

I had my personal logo ready for more than a year before I took the professional practices class. It was now a matter of coming up with a visual style and concept for the card. I was always a firm believer in functional design, so I decided to create a card not so much with an aesthetic in mind, but one that met all my practical needs.

I needed a card that worked to promote me as a freelancer, and also had to be easy for me to produce. My requirements were these:

1. It had to be produceable on regular colour laser printers. This was practical, because I didn’t need, nor wanted to spend the money for, a proper offset print run. If I went that route I would end up getting something cheap which was un-impressive.
2. The card had to be very impressive! To get past the freelancer barrier, people needed to notice this card, remember it, and through it remember me.
3. Because it was to be laser printed, I had to have a one-sided card, or at least one that was only printed on one side of the paper. Aligning the two faces of a two sided card on laser printers was almost impossible.

With these points in mind, I figured I needed a design that was printed one one side of the sheet but was somehow a two sided business card. I decided keeping to a simple one-sided card would make it look like a cheap print. While it would be a cheap print, it couldn’t look that way. I realised I could pull this off by printing both faces on one side and then folding it into a two sided card. I could have used glue to hold the two sides together, but that would have looked tacky. Since I have always been an origami buff, I decided to use a paper fold for the fastening mechanism. Thus my origami business card was born.

This card served me well. I used it for 5 years, and it never failed to get a response from anyone I gave it to. They wanted to know what it was, why it was folded, what was inside. It did what it was supposed to do and caught their attention. But after five years it was beginning to show its age. For one I now had a website which didn’t appear on the card. I stuck it into newer versions but it was an uncomfortable add-on. Also there was the issue with people trying to open it and not finding anything inside. I needed a new business card design so I set out to work on one.

Pop-Up Business Card

Another of my paper passions provided the solution to my new problem. If you want to print on only one side, but you want something to be on the other side as well, what better than a pop-up cut into the plain white side of the paper?

That was the trigger that set me off. This time my requirements were:

1. The design had to be laser printed on one side of the sheet, with creases and cut lines included.
2. My website address had to be prominent.
3. The cutlines had to form some sort of mini pop-up sculpture on the inside white of the card.
4. Since the card could now be opened, but also was a flat business card design, there had to be a simple fastening device to keep the card closed and flat when required.

The solution you can see in the pictures. A design that kept the very textured aesthetic from the first card and my website, while also including the pop-up word “design” on the inside. It graphically described what I do better than any line of text could have. I also put in an extra flap to fold over the open edge as a seal, to keep it flat, and this flap prominently featured my website address. Not only was this a flat business card, but it became a mini table-top display with my web address on it when opened.

Coming up with this final design was not a one step process, and I do plan on writing a more detailed article on the design of just this card in the future, with pictures and explantions of my thought process. As cards go, it worked pretty well. Granted it was a bit delicate, but if people were impressed with the origami one, you can imagine the reaction to this. It worked wonders!

Unfortunetely, my pop-up card design was far from perfect. I only ever made a score or so of these and they quickly disappeared to people I met over those next few weeks. I didn’t make any more because it was too time consuming. Remember that the issue with laser printing these is that I cut and finish every one of my business cards by hand. It adds a nice personal touch to everything, a philosophy I like to maintain with my clients, but there are always practical limitations. While I could cut and fold two dozen origami cards in an hour, it took me an hour to just cut four of these pop-up business cards. I am all for the personal touch, but there are only so many hours in the day.

I’m still very much sold on the idea of a pop-up business card. I’ve seen people do very simple things with a few cuts, but my point has always been to make my personal business cards impressive. For that I need something more elaborate but also easy to produce quickly. Accepting that this was not a problem to be solved overnight, I shelved this particular design after my initial batch and planned on working on more practical alternatives in the future.

Simple Business Card

The great pop-up card saga happened last year. Into this year I didn’t have many contacts with new people. I was doing a lot of continuing projects with old clients and the need for a business card didn’t come up. All the time the ideas for business cards and especially the pop-up continued to haunt me, but I knew I needed a simple interim design which would be quick and easy. There was also the nagging feeling in the back of my mind that something like a simple personal calling card was in order. Then last month, I suddenly got into quoting for a few copywriting gigs. When a meeting with a new prospective client was set up, I found myself card-less. This was now urgent.

My simple personal business card needed to do the following:

1. It had to be dead simple as a design.
2. It had to be one-sided, flat, and quick to produce.
3. It had to reflect my personality within its limitations.
4. It had to still be memorable, if not impressive.

Since it is fairly difficult to make a laser-printed rectangle of thick paper seem like anything more than what it is, I needed to be clever with what I put on it. I decided to get rid of all color because that could sometimes come out looking cheap from a laser printer. I highlighted the fact that I write by making the card one small paragraph of writing rather than the table of informtion people are accustomed to.

As a finishing touch I resorted to a small technical trick. I used “rich black”. For those not familiar with print production, let me explain. Print works by using four colour inks: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK). If you want a specific colour, you print the four inks on top of each other in various proportions to get what you need. To print black text you only need to print the black(K) ink, but black ink is never purely black, and it’s never the deepest black you can have. So, designers use a trick called “rich black” to compensate. This is where you print a little bit of one or two of the other colours (CMY) and then print the full black, like you normally would, on top. This makes the black look much deeper and ‘blacker’. In this card, this trick helped immensely and gave the text a bit of a raised appearence when studied closely. A worthy trick.

I’ve been using my simple black & white personal card for only a few weeks now and I love it. It’s easy to deal with and does exactly what it is meant to do. It might not attract as much attention as my previous trick cards, but I’m ok with that for now. I plan on continuing work on the pop-up design in time, but even when I do get another impressive personal card, I think I will continue to use the simple card in parallel, when it is more appropriate.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the saga of my personal business card designs to date. I hope you enjoyed this tale of design and intrigue, and I hope you will share your own busines card stories with me. I’m sure you have some good ones, and I can’t wait to hear them.

Samir

Not just folder icons but file icons as well. A new release of Blender is always special to all fans and users of this open source 3D software, me included, but this release has an extra incentive for me to be excited — it includes a new and improved image browser and most of the standard icons in this new browser are designed by yours truly.

More than a year ago, Andrea Weikert(Elubie) put out a call for icons for the new image browser she was developing within Blender. Blender had previously had an image browser window to select bitmap textures and such, but with changes in the code it had become unstable and unreliable with time. While the functionality remained in more recent versions, it was kept hidden from the general user due to quality issues. Andrea took on the task of updating it and improving this orphaned part of the Blender code so that it could once again become a useful and fully functional part of the Blender workhorse.

I’ve been using Blender for quite a few years now, but I’m not much of a hardcore programmer. When I heard of the return of the image browser and a chance to contribute to Blender development, I offered my services. There were some nice ideas in the discussion thread, especially Falgor’s — little wonder that he contributed the bookmark icon to the final release. My file and folder icon designs did fit in very well with the rest of the interface, and I tried to create as complete a set of icons as I could, and the discussion petered out there.

A few months ago when release notes for the new version started to be prepared and test versions were making the rounds, I was quite surprised to see my file and folder icons in the screenshots and test images. I’m even more surprised that they have now made it into the final release. Needless to say I’m grinning maniacally whenever I think about it.

You can see the icons above, and in the latest Blender 2.46 release if you are curious. Blender is a great piece of open source software, and simply a great piece of software period. I’ve used it for enough personal and commercial projects, both as the main tool and as a supporting tool, to appreciate its brilliance and its quirks. I’m thankful to all the developers for contributing so much of their time to continue to improve this excellent tool on such a regular basis.

My special thanks go to Andrea for working on this very useful part of the Blender code. It’s not the sort of thing that has the same public glamour as some of the high-end fancy graphical parts of the software’s functionality, but it’s functions like the image browser that make Blender a joy to use for regular day-to-day purposes. Also a shout out to Falgor for his bookmark icon design.

Enough release fever for now. To all the fans of Blender 3D and curious strangers, I suggest you go out and play with the new Blender release. That’s what I’m going to be doing … although I can’t promise to not sneak an occasional self indulgent peek at the new folder icons when no on else is watching.

Samir

I do hope it was piqued their curiosity, at least. It certainly resulted in some more thinking on the subject of online portfolios in particular, and some of the trials and tribulations involved. So much so that there was the realisation amongst the group that they had no idea where to begin with building a website, and I might be going in next week to conduct a workshop on creating a simple website from scratch. One seemingly insurmountable task at a time.

While I will write up the contents of the entire presentation as an article here some time soon, I did promise my stressed out, soon to be graduating, audience that I would post links to some of the resources and software I mentioned (I didn’t have the time to prepare a handout before the event, unfortunately), so here they are:

Portfolio PDF Tools

PDFCreator
http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator

OpenOffice.org
http://www.openoffice.org

Scribus
http://www.scribus.net

Portfolio Website Tools

KompoZer
http://www.kompozer.net

WordPress
http://www.wordpress.org

Samir

I haven’t given a formal presentation to a group of people in a while. In more recent years, as a freelance designer, I’ve often needed to think on my feet and go into explanatory monologues with clients on occasion, but that sort of spur-of-the moment, spontaneous occurrence was almost never planned and I rarely found it intimidating. This was in large part because I had full confidence in what I was saying. Always a plus.

Say the words presentation or public speaking, however, and most people, myself included, lose sight of the pragmatism demonstrated in my previous example. Then it comes down to pure and unadulterated fear of the fight-or-flight variety.

My encounters with stage fright, public speaking anxiety, and presentation success

My first experiences on stage was as part of a group. As a kid in school I was into singing. I was in the school choir, and our large group of mostly melodious chipmunks belted out very traditionalist Indian tunes and patriotic fervour at every public occasion. It was fun, and more attractive than the 5-10 minutes of stage time, were all those classes I got to miss legitimately for “practice” before any big event. Being the multi-cultural, multi-religious, and multi-everything place that India is, the calendar of Indian School Muscat was filled with occasions, and the practice was plentiful. The freedom of being able to march out of class unfettered when the call came, and walk the empty corridors as we headed for the music room, was a truly liberating experience for a school kid. Those experiences had more of an impact on me than I consciously give them credit for.

I did a few solo performances around the same time, and while I was not brimming with confidence, I managed to not be reduced to a quivering mass of custard. Into adolescence the singing stopped, changing voices can rarely be pushed too far and there is always the bit of awkwardness that comes with the territory. Then in my last year in school I had a bit of a set back. A solo song/poetry recital with no musical accompaniment went horribly wrong when I stepped on to the stage in front of a few hundred souls and my mind went completely blank as to how the tune went. I could remember the words perfectly, but the melody was suddenly a mystery to me. After what seemed like an eternity of silence, but was more likely a few seconds of utter panic on my part, I just dived in with a made-up tune. Thankfully, it was meant to be more about the poetry on that occasion, and perhaps I did get away with it to some extent. But, I knew I had messed up, and I’m sure the strain showed, and that was enough. A few days later when I was strolling around the school playground, a younger boy came up to me and congratulated me on my performance. A casual, friendly gesture, for which I was truly grateful. I said thank you, but I was never convinced I had really gotten away with it.

Not being one to dwell too consciously on my past demons, my first term in college I signed up for a public speaking course. When registering, I was told it was still available because it was a requirement and because so many were trying to avoid it for as long as possible. I thought it would be best to face this dragon post haste, and I did. My instructor was Huma Ehtisham, and she brought an intellectual intensity to the proceedings that truly got me excited about the prospect of speaking. In spite of the butterflies, the cold sweat, and the (literally) knocking knees, I got through my first 4-minute demonstration with what looked to the audience like complete confidence – at least that is what I’m assuming based on the encouraging applause I received when I had finished, and the paper plane soared into the audience. I had just demonstrated how to make a slightly more sophisticated paper plane.

After that the presentations seemed to get easier a little, although the complete panic was always there and palpable. That class was a great way to start a college education, and I am always glad I took the plunge on that particular occasion. That class, the people in it and the wonderful lady at the helm added a lot to my reserve of confidence and my general thought processes as they have come to be over the years. For that, I am thankful to them all.

What makes a good presentation?

Throughout the rest of my stint as an undergraduate at university, I had the pleasure and the panic of presenting in front of a class on many occasions. By and large they were a resounding success, as long as I was not completely indifferent towards the topic in question. That never really happened because I always made sure I found an angle to everything that would keep me interested above all else. There are many who talk volumes about the importance of holding the interest of the audience in public speaking situations, but I feel not enough is said about the virtues of the speaker holding his/her own interest first.

I also made full use of my growing skills as a visual designer. Where others relied on staid charts and slides with borrowed templates and cumbersome bullet points, I always put in the extra effort to come up with custom designed slides and graphics to stand out and get my point across in a more entertaining way. In the early days I actually worked with video based graphics using the simple Scala 100 video titling software on my ageing Amiga 500. Later I would simply create slide images in graphics packages and then run them as a slideshow with IrfanView or some other small image viewer. Till date I have never used PowerPoint.

Possibly the most important technique in my presentations was the story telling. I tried to make every topic a narration rather than a bunch of facts and figures. Not only did it engage the audience more than bullet point recitals, but it forced me to prepare much more extensively for my presentations. So much so, that I never carried any cue cards or notes during the presentation. I would stand up there with my visuals behind me, and I would talk my well-rehearsed heart out without a care in the world, and without checking any written refreshers. I think the cue-cardless presentation greatly impressed the audience and gave me an immense dose of credibility in their eyes. If the audience thinks you are credible, they listen with more attention and then minor flaws in your delivery are usually ignored. That’s a good place to be.

Presentations, speeches, and public speaking stints of every colour are usually about informing the audience about something. Having said that I find that pure information is never attractive or engaging. Some packaging, and some context is a required embellishment to any message, to keep the audience interested and to keep them listening. In whatever small way possible, no matter how grim the topic, or how serious the information, you must keep them entertained. This doesn’t mean you let off a continuous stream of cheesy one-liners through the duration and try to be funny or amusing all the time, but in your material, or in your visuals, or in your delivery, create a bit of entertainment value. It always pays dividends, because a good presentation is part discourse, part discussion, part performance, and part huddling around the fire with your audience telling them a wondrous story of the world, which they cannot help but listen too. That last part speakers often ignore or forget, but it is essential because in our hearts we are all storytellers and we are all fascinated by a well told tale.

Presentations about portfolios

That brings me back to now. I have a presentation to deliver on electronic design portfolios, and part of the reason I went through all my stories and advice above was to remind myself of how it is done. It’s easy to take these things for granted sometimes and that never has great results when you find yourself in the hotspot.

Most of my own advice I can take, although some of it might not be appropriate to this particular occasion. The fully prepared and rehearsed presentation will simply not be possible, because I don’t have enough time to prepare and perfect a one hour long presentation, and that is how long it needs to be. That being said, I will obviously have some structure to the thing, and some prepared sections. The rest will have to be more loose and extempore. I think that is a good compromise given the time I have to get this done.

As a topic, electronic portfolios and websites for creative work is a pretty good one, and one that fits in well with my interests and with the broad topics I write about on this site. I have my own solutions to portfolios, as you can see on my works page. While that wasn’t, and still isn’t, meant to be my final and ideal solution, it does its job and communicates to potential clients my range of talents adequately. I have bigger plans for the display and discussion of my work, but they are only plans and once they mature into action, you will be the first to know.

This makes the material that will come out of this presentation even more relevant. How to make a portfolio is a tricky question and one that plagues many a creative soul, so once the presentation is done I would like to put up some of my material here. If I think the information of digital portfolios can be useful, I would be glad to share it with a wider audience on this blog.

Wish me luck, and stay tuned for more as it happens.

Samir

Today I loaded a 50 Kg drum of glue into a Porsche 911. Yes, you read right, I mean a real live Porsche 911 sports car, not an old beat up Toyota with a bumper sticker that says “My other car is a Porsche”. And no, I’m not giving up on design and writing and going into the manual labour market any time soon, but this is an interesting story anyway.

My Dad works in the field of industrial chemicals, and being the overly conscientious worker that he is, it is not unheard of for us to sometimes take a detour during his off hours to make some small but urgent delivery to one of his clients. It’s usually a bag or a few bottles of some of the more harmless stuff he deals in. This evening we set out on the mission to deliver a drum of food grade glue to a guy whose factory would come to a stand still without it. We arranged to meet him somewhere convenient and set off. I’m used to seeing some guy in a pickup truck or a normal saloon car take the delivery at these meetings, but this time was different. The person we were meeting was new in town and unfamiliar with the place, so a few quick exchanges on the phone later we were told to look for the Porsche in the parking lot. That piece of information didn’t really sink in until we pulled over next to a metallic silver Porsche 911 and the person at the wheel waved out to attract our attention.

Now, most of you are thinking, “Wow! A Porsche!”, but that was not the thing that had my attention. One of the sad side effects of living in Dubai is that you see too many super cars too often and seeing a Porsche is not really an occasion for surprise any more, at least when you drive around as much as we do. No, my concern was more in the area of, “How in blazes do you fit a drum into that car?”. We stopped, said hello to the young guy at the wheel and then things got more interesting: the drum we were carrying was not the smallish plastic 25 Kg version I was accustomed to seeing during these deliveries, instead it was a double sized 50 Kg model!

It was troublesome enough getting that drum out of our car. After a lot of struggling we managed, and then our friend with the Porsche said we could try the boot of his car. Since the 911 is a mid-engine car, the “boot” is in the front. You open the bonnet and there is a cosy little receptacle that can be used for luggage. I was actually surprised by how big it was considering the very compact shape of the Porsche. Our next challenge was lifting the drum into the 911. We did manage to do that after a lot of huffing, puffing and adjusting by all. Throughout that process, my main concern was to not scratch the paint on the 911 as we slipped the drum into position. How much does it cost to touch up the paint work of a 911 anyway? I didn’t really want to find out. Eventually the drum fit snugly into the boot of the car, as if it was designed for that very purpose, our grateful 911 driver thanked us and drove away.

I found the entire experience bizarre, but also very encouraging from a designer’s point of view. The boot of the Porsche 911 was much more spacious and capable that I would have ever imagined. Later I checked up on some blue prints and came across the early prototype drawings (left) for the original 911 design from 1971. As you can see the boot that I have described in the more modern offspring was very much there in the original design, shown holding two suitcases, which it is more than capable of doing. To design a sports car of the calibre of the Porsche 911 and still keep in mind the need for an adequate storage space is a design philosophy worth applauding in my book, and that has forever increased the status of Porsche design in my mind.

The other thing we noticed as we were dumping 50 kilos into the front of the car is that the nose never moved an inch. There was no sagging of the suspension, no weighing down of the body, and no perceptible visual change in the car. I’ve seen enough cars to know that even pickups and trucks designed for carting heavy loads react very noticeably to the addition or offloading of a major weight. But the Porsche 911′s obviously magical suspension just made it seem like nothing had changed. Yet another piece of brilliant design and engineering.

I think this philosophy of designing something with the highest technological and stylistic goals while still keeping it within the realms of practical performance and sheer usefulness is an achievement that serves as a good reminder to all of us that such a complex goal is possible to reach. I have seen hundreds and thousands of examples of design both in the online and offline worlds where technological and stylistic goals are often at odds with usability and practicality, and never the twain shall meet. Avant garde magazine designs are often unreadable and legible book designs are often stoic and unexciting. A similar dichotomy exists in web design where the trend seems to swing between excess and minimalism. We have been through the excesses of the late 90′s when every site had a million flashing gizmos and animated intros and now we live in a world of plain white backgrounds and strict modernist grid layouts. Why can’t we have both? Why must we sacrifice one for the other?

I think as in many other fields the question of minimalist vs rich web interfaces and blog templates becomes a bit of a religious issue, with screaming soothsayers on both sides of the argument spending most of their energies deriding the opposing camp. But the fact remains that the very purpose of design is to reconcile these two opposing energies of the creative process: form and function. My little experience today with the immensely versatile Porsche 911 reminded me of this fact, and this is one reminder we all need to get at regular intervals to make sure our online endeavours are best served in the design department.

Today I loaded a 50 Kg drum of glue into a Porsche 911, and I came away learning something about web site design and the online user experience. Is your web site or blog template a Porsche 911, or do you just have a lame excuse on a bumper sticker?

Now that I seem to have ironed out the kinks in the workflow to a large extent, and considering the next issue is going to sneak up on me faster than I expect, I thought it was time to see what was new in my weapons of choice, and what developments I can look forward to in the near future. This is what I found.

The GIMP is probably the most maligned of all the creative open source packages, for its interface, for its ancient core and many other real and religious reasons. But on a practical level, while it may not be the snazziest of the bunch, it is a very mature piece of work. Once you learn how to use it, it easily becomes an unobtrusive part of your work flow. The GIMP is developed in two versions, a stable one for big fixes and a development version for new feature additions, cool new gizmos, and other larger changes which are not quite ready for the big-time yet. Since Windows build of the cutting-edge development version are hard to come buy, I have yet to try all the latest features that are coming up in this software. But, there is plenty to look forward to. The next version will have an improved brush engine and also includes a very impressive image extraction system based on recent research. While the GIMP isn’t part of this year’s Google Summer of Code, there were already many interesting projects completed under last year’s event that should find their way into the next major release. These include a healing brush, a perspective-based cloning tool, and vector layers amongst others. By all indications the current development version with all the shiny new features should be released this summer as version 2.4. That is more than enough to keep me busy for a long time to come.

Scribus, like the others, is in a constant state of development, and the team behind it regularly releases stability and bug-fix releases that are steadily improving the PDF and SVG handling capabilities of the software amongst other things. There has always been a very feature complete and ambitious road-map to this project that has struck a balance between must-have functionality and lower level API changes and core programming improvements. These people have taken on the daunting task of giving the world a viable open source alternative to full-featured commercial DTP applications and they are getting there. Two major new additions to look forward to are to come through GSOC projects over the next few months. We can look forward to an imposition plugin and also LaTeX based mathematical symbol and formula support. While the later is not of direct interest to me in the general purpose material that I work on, it should be a boon to the scientific and academic community who are after all some of the most prolific and vocal users of open source software. Imposition functionality, however, will be a godsend for anyone having to deal with compatibility issues with their offset print shop, or even people doing DIY small print runs which they would like to bind themselves. Here’s wishing the student programmers and the core team the best of luck for the completion of their immediate projects and the longer term road map in general.

I think I can safely say that of the three applications in this print workflow, Inkscape is my favourite. Not because it is in any way more capable than the other two, but because it feels the most complete. the strange thing is that it has felt that way since early beta versions, probably because interface simplicity and installation logistics have always been a top priority with this team. They have always known the Windows user was going to be their major audience and they have made sure to cater to them whole-heartedly rather than grudgingly. It shows in the finished product. Inkscape’s vector tools are a dream to use and this program truly makes illustration a pleasurable process. In fact the handling of bezier curves in Inkscape and in Blender are my favourite implementations of the technology. In my mind they are better than the commercial implementations that I have tried in the way they intuitively fit into the way I think about curves and manipulate them. Inkscape’s development is well planned like the other projects here, but they also have a tendency to drop in unexpected gems into new versions. One such feature in the upcoming version is the line engraving feature. It’s certainly not something I expected anytime soon in Inkscape, and you certainly won’t find me complaining about its inclusion. Add to that the very impressive list of seven GSOC projects being worked on and you can be sure that Inkscape is going nowhere but up in the foreseeable future.

As I was writing this post I came across the announcement about the release of Ubuntu Studio on Blendernation. Not only does this new customised Linux distribution include the triumvirate of applications I have mentioned above, but it also comes with a plethora of solutions for sound, music and video enthusiasts that should keep us all busy learning new skills till the end of time. And it includes Blender.

It would seem there are very exciting times ahead for those of us who have made the shift, and those making the shift towards an open source workflow for our collective creative kicks.

What open source software do you use in your work (or play) that you can’t live without? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

Did you know that March used to be the first month of the year?

It’s true. In fact, January and February didn’t even exist until they were invented by the Romans around 700BC. And it was a whole 650 years later that Julius Caesar declared January to be the first month of the year. He really liked pushing people around, that guy. But some people refused to be pushed. You’ll be surprised to learn that January didn’t become the official beginning of the year in France until the 1500s. And the British colonies didn’t accept the January New Year until the mid 1700s.

Now put yourself into March’s shoes. It must be the most disgruntled month of them all. How would you like to have enjoyed the limelight for so long and then to be cast aside as simply that calendar month that appears between that very short month of the year and April fools day, and everyone was told to beware of your ‘ides’? Not very glamorous is it?

Purely to make it up to our much loved and very hard working month of March, I present to you this table calendar that you can print out and put together. I hope you enjoy it and I encourage you to forward it to everyone you know who would appreciate the chance for a fresh start.

Wishing you a very Happy New Year. It’s never too late for new beginnings …

Download PDF (483 kb)

For all you wallpaper enthusiasts, here are large versions of the illustration from the calendar for your desktop:

Resolutions:

1024X768 (75 kb)
1152X864 (88 kb)
1280X960 (103 kb)
1280X1024 (106 kb)
1600X1200 (161 kb)

1280X800 (92 kb)
1440X900 (112 kb)
1680X1050 (141 kb)
1920X1200 (189 kb)