Type T Design Interactive Resume & Portfolio

Interactive Media

1991

In 1991 I was thinking about moving to Minneapolis, and as part of my preparations for finding a new job I created an interactive resume/portfolio using Macromind Director. (Macromind is now Macromedia, and Director is the grandaddy of interactive media applications in general, and of Flash in particular).

The project is not cross-platform, but if you have a Macintosh I highly recommend that you download it and have a look. It still works perfectly (at least under Mac OS 8.6), apart from a couple of cosmetic glitches, and the Portfolio section includes a lot of my pre-computer illustrations and early print work that I'm not including in this site.

I did every little thing on this piece: writing, design, layout, navigation scheme, icons, scanning, and programming. Especially the programming.

Director's Lingo scripting language was easy for me to learn since I already knew HyperTalk from working on King Frog, and the two languages were quite similar. My goals in this piece were much more ambitious than anything I'd tried before, however, and mastering the details that were required really made me stretch.

More Screenshots

As you can see from the screen above, I spent a lot of programming time building tricks into the navigation controls. I'm especially proud of the Backtrack button, which anticipated the Back button that's now standard fare in web browsers.

Other hidden tricks:

If you drag the Control Panel away from its normal position and release it within about 10 pixels of where it belongs it will snap back to the correct position.
Most of the control objects in the interface (links, the control panel, the navigation pop-up menu, etc.) have help methods associated with them. If you commmand-click on them a context-sensitive help message will appear next to your cursor. The cast member that's used for this maneuver is the little pane at the lower right of the screen. It's supposed to be hidden, and it was as long as screens were 640x480 (see the glitches page).
There are hyperlinks in some of the text that will take you to related screens. Although I made them invisible (and thus hard to find), I did program the cursor to change to a special icon when you mouse over one, and all the links on a page will be momentarily hilighted if you hit command-space on your keyboard. (The web's colored and underlined links are a definite improvement over invisible links.)
Pictures with thicker borders on them are what I termed "slide shows". Clicking on a slide show picture leaves you on the current page but changes the picture and its caption. Clicking on it again will continue cycling through the pictures until you return to the first one.
The little triangle above the section title is a pop-up menu that lists all the major sections, as well as any pages within the current section. If you hold down the shift key and click on the triangle you'll get a menu listing the last ten pages you visited, so you can jump directly back to any of them.

More Screenshots

In the end I never distributed the piece, and the move to Minneapolis didn't happen. My employers at Woodland took a look at what I'd been doing with Director and decided they needed to sweeten the pot and keep me around.