Vermont Artisan Photos

Photos of the Vermont Artisan Design & Gallery exhibition are now up on Kimengyeo.com to liven up the promo page. The exhibition photo development process was steamlined last year when everything was databased. The front end is controlled by 2 ColdFusion templates... one for displaying the thumbnails and another for the closeups. All that needs to be done is photo resizing and some data entry, but no page building, reducing development time significantly.

Vermont Artisan Design Exhibition Photos

China Slideshows

I added 3 more slideshows to Frommers.com. Some of the major destinations already had a ton of professional photos from the Day by Day guidebook series. So I searched for photos I had of the smaller Chinese destinations.

Shanghai (side trip to Suzhou)
Nanjing
Huang Shan

These were all shot with a traditional (not digital) camera, scanned at hi-res and cleaned up in Photoshop. I also shot the photos you see on the main pages of Nanjing & Huang Shan, but those are not included in the slideshow because they were lo-res pictures from an old Handspring Visor PDA camera.

Microsite CFMX & CSS

Combining design with technology has always been Kerwin's goal. At the beginning of the year, Frommers.com launched a new feature called "Microsites," which consisted customized content for themes chosen by the editorial team. These "Microsites" included a main topic, with 7-10 categories. One of the items that needed to be developed was a graphical unit that would appear in the existing Trip Ideas section. It would also have to display the Microsite name along with a clickable listing of categories. For this little element, a small CFMX application would pull items from the database and save out an XHTML/CSS file that combined the photo with a translucent, clickable link list.

Click here for the Beach promo unit

Florals & Gardens

It's always nice to start out a new year with a graphical update to a website. Kimengyeo.com just had its homepage and painting main page graphics updated for a slightly newer look. 5 new paintings were added to the Floral & Gardens sections. They were actually older paintings, but were requested to be displayed by the artist's representative and haven't been displayed before under the current design.

Updates tend to be quick with this site because the galleries are dynamically controlled by CFMX & MS Access. Each painting and all of its attributes are stored in a database. The homepage and other main pages, while manually created, have graphical components that are templated in Photoshop.

Philippines 2007 DVD Cover

I didn't have any suitable photos for the Philippines DVD cover as all of my shots were family portraits. Luckily my sister,
Emily stayed in the country a little longer and captured some great shots of Tagaytay Resort. The front cover was actually a portait shot as well, but it was in a high enough resolution that I was able to crop out the person and still get an interesting vertical composition. I used Sheila as the title font because it matched the look of the bamboo fence. A similar texture was used to fill the title. Colors were taken from the fence and tree leaves for a limited color palette.

For more on Emily Siy's work, visit www.emilysiy.com.

For a hi-res view and more details on the Philippines 2007 DVD Cover, click here.

Niño & Julie's Wedding DVD Cover

This is the 2nd non-travel DVD cover in a row and since there will be more of these coming in the future, a new subsection called Occasions & Events was broken out yesterday.

In this piece, the subjects had to be the newlyweds, which limited the choices and as with most occasions, ruled out using landscapes. One of the challenges with this cover was fitting the title into the given photo on the front cover. The abstract wavy shapes were taken from the iMovie HD theme used on the DVD menu, but they also reflect the barong that Niño is wearing. For more details and a hi-res view, click here.

DVD Main Page Updates

The DVD covers were rearranged on the Print Design main page. The three featured covers now consist of the most recent event cover, the most recent travel cover and one classic. Since the Philippines cover has a green palette and the other two are red and white, it was placed in the middle for layout symmetry.

The DVD main page has also been updated. The covers are now broken out into two subcategories... Travel and Occasions & Events.

Miniature Opera House

This image was created slightly over a year ago, but is being featured again on Frommers.com as they highlight Australia during February 2008. It was placed on the homepage as a means to draw attention to the monthly contest. The surreal look made up of crystal pond ripples and perfect clouds is more eye-catching that the standard, generic Opera House photo. Additionally, a hi-res version of this image was also used for a Facebook app.

Click here for details

Vermont Artisan Design & Gallery

Kim Eng Yeo will be showcasing some of her work at the Vermont Artisan Design & Gallery in Brattleboro, VT regularly (1st Friday of each month). The Exhibitions section of her website has all of the details. Her biography has also been updated.