Site News - New Site: Rhino

Photo: Chris Laskey

A new site has been added to my portfolio, Rhino. Rhino is a portfolio piece showcasing some recent graphic design and javascript work. The content is more filler than anything else; rhino currently houses my winter 2008 resume.

The Design

The background image was created in Photoshop CS2. (for a full list of image credits, see below). Its astonishing how much my skill has increased since spending time with paths and the pen tool.

Credits: the background was created by me in Photoshop Creative Suite 2, utilizing a sunburst brush by blazter[JavierZhX], a stain brush by PhotoshopRanger, rhino photography by Mister-E, and background picture by Niconectado.

The Code

I’ve been a long time user of MooTools (almost all effects on this site are written with MooTools). But since I’m also a big believer in stretching your knowledge and learning something new, I decided to spend some time playing around with jQuery.

I was pleasantly surprised with jQuery. Not only is it fast and compact (14k compressed), but also its by far the easiest javascript language I’ve ever coded in thus far. I wrote the accordion feature from scratch, in under 20 minutes and under 20 lines of code.

For effects, MooTools is still top in my book. But jQuery has really impressed me in a short period of time, and I look forward to developing more code in it.

On a related note, in the near future I’ll be launching a new section dedicated to sharing the javascript code I use in my sites. In the meantime, if you can’t wait that long for the Rhino code, you can always view the source code.

Credits: XHTML, CSS, and Javascript was written from scratch by me.

Try it out

You can see a working version of the site here. And as always, you can see it in my portfolio as well. Tell me what you think - I welcome all feedback, positive and constructive.