Animate your portfolio

An online portfolio is an essential tool for anyone in the creative industries, and it's likely to be what you're judged by whether your job has anything to do with designing websites or not. It's important, therefore, to create a web presence which both displays your work well and has a strong, professional-looking interface. It's also true that creative work is constantly evolving, so you won't want to create a portfolio which is so complex in its implementation that you can't easily update it.

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Here, we're going to create a basic Flash website with a few pages and a simple set of buttons to bring up four different galleries showcasing different types of illustration work. We use a simple graphical design made up of solid flat shapes in muted colours so that the artwork itself really stands out. We then do a little ActionScript programming to create a set of galleries which load in images from a folder elsewhere on the website. By doing this rather than embedding the gallery images in the Flash file, we'll be able to update our gallery at a later date simply by uploading new pictures and naming them 1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg, and so on. This will be a lot easier than having to re-write the entire site every time we want to include a new image.

Finally, we show you how to have some fun with animation - again using ActionScript - by creating a scrolling landscape in which creatures run by. This is used to decorate the front page and give the otherwise rather sober introductory page of the website a little personality. By creating our animation entirely in ActionScript, we can control the movements of objects much more finely. We can even introduce randomness to them, something which is impossible when animating on the timeline.

Click here to download the support files (5.8 MB)

Click here to download the tutorial for free