Procrastination is practically a recognised sport in Cambridge and when the holidays come round what better way to avoid revision than to redesign your website again? To be fair, I had been planning on doing it anyway because I couldn't find a way to make my new improved photo gallery fit in with the old design. Also, the old design with the photos of Fiji and New Zealand in the header didn't seem appropriate now my gap year finished over a year ago.
The idea for this design came to me whilst I was walking through Nottingham. It popped almost fully formed into my head, which was kind of nice, and I created the whole thing in less than 24 hours. The half-face was inspired by a David Bailey picture I think I remember seeing many years ago (although I could of course be mistaken; I know I've seen it somewhere before but I can't remember where). I wanted to keep with a black and white design with just a few splashes of colour and looking at it I can't help but notice I've been influenced by subtraction. The sidebar was moved to the bottom of the page as seems to be the latest fashion (it also happened to fit in neatly with the rest of my design).
The photo gallery has been completely rewritten, mashing together the old one which dynamically queried Flickr and the one I designed for FastMail last summer. Credit goes to an old diveintomark design for 'inspiring' the idea of splitting an image into lots of little squares. The gallery has loads of funky features; it builds the page dynamically from Flickr each time, lets you view an album as resizable thumbnails and pre-loads the next image whilst you're looking at the current one. A filmstrip at the bottom allows you to browse thumbnails whilst looking at a large photo and the photo resizes to make the optimum use of your screen. The whole thing is written in JavaScript and requires no server-side support at all. Groovy huh?
I've decided to release the code to my photo gallery for the world to use as it beats the hell out of any other online photo gallery I've ever seen and quite frankly the world is full of too many frustratingly bad photo galleries. I'm licensing it under the GPL 2.0 license. If this doesn't fit in with your usage, send me an email and we'll see if we can sort something out. You can find it at the newly created code section of my website.