AndrewHeiss.com

What a gargantuan project!!!

This site was commissioned for a series of summer folk music camps held in Idaho and Utah by a new upstart called Blue Sky Music Camps, run by members of the Aaron Ashton Band and Ryan Shupe and the Rubber Band, local Utah County music groups. I was given the basic design and was responsible for the rest: HTML/CSS coding, backend scripting for camp registration and payment, and managing a marketing e-mail subscription list.

The largest web application I've ever made, this website covers every aspect of the upcoming 2008 joint ULA/MPLA Library Conference. I had to set up several types of registration forms for presenters, exhibitors, and attendees, save all the registraion information in MySQL, and allow for and keep track of secure credit card payments through Authorize.net. It was, and still continues to be, a massive collaborative undertaking, but the system works well. I was given the logo and the other graphic elements. I was in charge of the PHP/MySQL backend and HTML/CSS coding.

My boss asked me to make a website that provided easy access to video screencasts that answer the most common computer problems that come up at the Information Commons in the Library. I had just gotten CS3 Design Premium that week, so I was excited to use Dreamweaver to its fullest. This was one of my early attempts at a tableless, CSS based website, with small graphic elements done in Photoshop CS3. I used the new Adobe Spry framework to make the Accordion interface. The entire back end is extremely compartmentalized ? making a change to one XML file adds a new movie to the accordion list. It is also one of my early attempts at using dynamic PHP includes. Although not entirely live yet, it will hopefully be useful for patrons of the library.

From 2003-2005 I served an LDS mission in Rome, Italy. Every week I wrote e-mails to my family and friends detailing my experiences in Italy. Now that I've been home for a while and have some time to collect everything, I'm working on a book of all the e-mails I sent home during those two years. I've tried to make it a ""coffee table"" book with lots of pictures and color to attract attention. The complete book still isn't finished?just one chapter so far.

Since marrying my wife, Nancy, in 2005, we've collected thousands of pictures that have just been sitting on our hard drive collecting dust (and trying to run away...). In an effort to do something useful with our digital pictures, we created the One Thousand Words series; a collection of photo books with minimal text. We used InDesign and Photoshop CS3. The books are available at Lulu: Volume I: In the beginning... Volume II: Adventures in Jordan

I teach semi-regular classes on InDesign at the Multimedia Lab at the library. In one of my classes, I focus on using InDesign to design and layout a full book. For content, I have the students work on Aesop's Fables or something else downloaded from Project Gutenberg, since long public domain text makes for a great book?especially when it's great literature. After months of starting books that neither I nor my students ever completed, I decided that it was time to officially complete a project. I laid out Andrew Lang's 1898 text of Arabian Nights' Entertainments in InDesign CS3, used Photoshop for image manipulation, and Illustrator (of all things) for Arabic type management, since CS3 unfortunately does not support right-to-left text. I found a way around that limitation though, and will post a tutorial about using Arabic type in InDesign and the rest of CS2/3. Order the book from Lulu.com