You are very talented. :-) I enjoyed your site.

Sharon

Your graphics are great, but I found the site frustrating to use: it took over a minute for the front page to load, and the loading circle appeared twice, giving me a false sense of when it would be ready. The play controls or whatever they are are odd - what does the plus mean? There were no tooltips to let me know.

It's still a lot more usable than most design flash sites, and looks a lot nicer. :)

I believe the flash part used for displaying pictures and stuff is SlideShowPro http://slideshowpro.net/) meaning it's not really something he can change I don't think. As for the site and work I think it's nice, simple and effective.

eeblet,

It sounds like you need to update your flash player (and/or your internet connection or browser.) His site loaded in less than 3 seconds on my computer, and while the "full screen" doesn't work in the best way, the site did work just fine in FireFox.

Oh, and in my experience, the plus sign always means "click the plus sign for more".

Joe - I wouldn't tell people your age in your bio. Too much information, and it's more likely to work against you than for you.

AK

Hey Guys,

I hear you Alaskan on the age thing. Ageism is alive and well in America, I guess 25 year old's are scarier to work with then 35 year olds in our industry. ( that's a joke btw, it's about experience and knowledge of our industry imo.)
Regardless I think I heard this statement enough that I should remove it.

But I will be updating my site a bit further with a Blog about stuff I see here and there to contextualize my personality to the work I do. And I will be fixing what I can on that slideshowpro flash swf. I think their are some gizmos I can turn on and off including the + and the full screen options. I think if I remove the full screen and either remove the + option or include a bit of a project description when you click on the + that would be a nice feature.

It's still a work in progress and I wish you all thanks and for taking a second for the comments, critiques, and praise. I'll link you all to a personal wall paper illustration I created feel free to download it!
http://www.sisudesigns.com/submission/beginning.jpg

Sincerely,
Joseph Maguire
joemaguiredesign.com

Is the condom logo a school project? If so, I'd drop it. Seems that every other student these days does a condom project in college ;o)

Nice site. The Flash isn't over-the-top. That said, I'm not sure you really need flash. The one thing that I miss mostly on all-flash sites is the ability to bookmark specific pieces of work to show others.

You can code a flash website with individual page bookmarking capabilities. It's not flash that takes page bookmarking away, it's the site owners who don't write their own code.

Sorry if I sound snippy, but I have clients all the time that say "no flash" because they believe the two top myths; it can't be bookmarked, and it can't be spidered by search engines. Neither has been true since about 2003.

Alaskan:

You are correct. However, in general, these features aren't usually added to the site as they take work above and beyond the basic presentation. As long as they are put into the requirements document, then yea, they don't specifically have to be issues.

I like your site. The designs shown are very good! Refreshing :)

Aluminum.. www.lifestyles.com it's my logo done at an agency in town, the work is cited on my site.

Regarding book marking, I am not as concerned about it as you might think. I have a flickr account as well as a behance.net account. I get a tremendous amount of traffic from my subpages like that. To anyone else in this industry FLICKR holds the key to getting you into blogs and such.

real condom company work = got to keep it in the porfolio. ;o)

"Regarding book marking, I am not as concerned about it as you might think."

That's fine. Just saying that's something I look at. Not a make it or break it issue.

As for Flickr...be careful...I know they've been (or were, at least) cracking down on NON-photographic work being posted in there. (Kind of a dumb policy, IMHO, but just FYI...)

Regarding Flickr: I was hesitant too at first but I carefully read their legal, and it is considered safe under the design agreement that I read and the policy checker that reviewed my site. I also Purposely do not allow people to download anything. Last I checked if they remove design work from there, then I'll get my 40 bucks back lol. But it is a great place to get tags.. and bring traffic into your site if you do it right.

"It sounds like you need to update your flash player (and/or your internet connection or browser.) "

Ummmm.... As I said, I'm coming from a usability perspective. Graceful degradation, progressive enhancement - that good stuff. But that turns out not to be the issue anyway (FF, latest flash, fast connection)! It's just a very bizarrely slow slideshow. I expected a movie... or something, and the first time I visited, I didn't stay on the homepage long enough for the second img, just long enough to see:

-Loading circle
-Static image
-Loading circ-
*click on a link I am bored*

Anyways, it's obviously not a problem for anyone else.