Flash Image Gallery
There are two questions I often get asked by students (just about to graduate)… the first is “How much do I charge for design work?” and the second is how do “I do I make a portfolio website?“.
As for the first, that could take a few blog posts… I have a great primer for fine artists as well as interactive designers if you are curious let me know and I’ll post it.
If you are interested in making a portfolio website you don’t have to stick with just HTML or just Flash. You can integrate the two if you plan ahead. Also, you don’t need to make a static HTML gallery in the website… there is a good range of options to choose from including Flash, PHP Gallery, Flickr. I’m going to introduce some simple Flash Image Gallery options. There are also quite a few designers that are taking advantage of Blog engines (wordpress, movabletype, expression engine) to create website portfolios – i.e. http://www.kevinevans.net/.
Some reasons for using Flash resources:
- You don’t have the time to work on a whole new Flash gallery
- You don’t have the skills for Actionscript or XML
- You are looking for a clean interface to include in your existing design/layout
- You took that Digital Imaging class but can’t find your archived CD with all the FLAs on it
Four great resources are available that include Flash, XML features. They use a very similar web2.0 look and feel when it comes to the GUI. I’ve used them before when a customized XML/PHP Flash Gallery is not needed, recommended them to clients in the past and they have been helpful in getting things up and running fairly quick w/o much overhead.
All of these types of Flash image galleries can be easily made on your own by following examples on the web (Kirupa, Ultrashock, Actionscript, FlashKit, et.al.) but if you are looking for something to get up and running fairly quickly these options might be for you. If anything, they might give you a good idea on what to include in a Flash Image Gallery if you wanted to build/customize one on your own.
- Monoslideshow, monoslideshow.com
- Postcard Viewer + Image Viewer + Simple Viewer from airtightinteractive.com
- FlashGallery, flashgallery.org
- SlideShowPro, slideshowpro.net
MonoSlideshow is around $20 and includes a spiffy Ken Burns effect on images. It doesn’t include an option for getting a hold of the actionscript code.
AirtightInteractive family of Flash Image Viewers are nice. The Postcard Viewer is pretty slick in that it creates a gridded thumbnail and zooms into the selected image. Simple Viewer is straight forward thumbnail left column and image on the right. These product lines are free unless you want to dabble with the code then the pro versions run you $45.
FlashGallery is free, no source code. However, it’s a pretty robust system that gets your images up quick.
SlideShowPro is similar to FlashGallery however it’s a bit more powerful and can connect to a backend database. It’s a bit more pricey running at $40 but unlike FlashGallery, it will also do FLV movies inline, so that’s great for portfolios with animations.
This post is tagged: actionscript, art+design, graphic design, information design, new media