I know I’ll get the treatment from my friends when I tell them I just released version 8 of my site. It seems like every year I get the itch to redo it and while this year was no different, there was a reason why I did it.

For the past 3 or 4 years I have been carving this website into a blog slash portfolio slash all encompassing portal of sorts for myself and my business. While that was working to a point, it wasn’t really honing in on what my ultimate goal was, generating more business. The site traffic is there and the content is up, but the focus was lost and got mixed up on things that I never really paid enough attention to, ahem, the blog.

Moving forward in 2011 I gave myself a personal goal of getting more high end business, doing more commercial work and less focus on editorial. While it’s nice to do editorial and the challenges that come from it, I really want to hone in on my skills and really start producing more high end commercial content. I needed to redo my portfolio.

Rewind 6 months.

When I first thought of this, I knew I would have to do this in several parts, design a new site and redo all my content. Starting with an already good platform, I started researching and tweaking my current design until I came up with something I felt was going to be good. After the design mold was set, I had to update my flash gallery scripting, this isn’t any easy going process because I had to question whether or not I wanted to continue using flash or not, but ultimately, I wasn’t going to fall into the Apple cannon fodder and stop because a few select systems wouldn’t run it.  After the design was done, the flash was working, I had to focus on the content, I had to redo all of it if I wanted to compete at a high enough level to win jobs based on portfolio samples.

Over the course of a few months I took each picture I decided was going to go in my gallery and did all new edits on all of them. New techniques, old techniques and a lot of time spent making sure they’re up to my new standards to be in my portfolio. Blood, sweat and tears and the site is ready to go. Good friend, fellow colleague and programmer wiz Mike Bowen lent his craft to the code and we were in business.

I hope everyone likes the new site and direction I’ve decided to take it being more about the portfolio and less about the blog

Composite Rig shot of the Team Menace Toyota Corolla AE86

As a part of the new items I’ve started designing for 2011, Proposals are a hot ticket, especially for teams, cars and builders. This is a sample of what I built for SpeedFactory.

It was requested that we make a flyer for the Tuner Galleria showcase for 2011 that could be altered for featured cars, models and talent. Check out the original design we created for their show.

Corksport is well known in the Mazda realm as being the high end producers of performance Mazda products. They requested that I design them a new, hip brochure they could hand out at events and be suitable at dealerships. We did two brochures for them, one for the Mazda 3 and another for the Speed3 model.