I remember a flash site I came across years ago and it had a grid of games to explore with a super pleasing mouseover effect. That became something I always wanted to build into a site but hadn't had the occasion. Then Kevin Cross mentioned he was looking for help with making his new illustration portfolio.

Kevin already had a good looking portfolio site but was looking to remodel it. As for me, I had a few experiments I was looking to try with jQuery, one of them being the "pleasing mouseover effect grid".

I also wanted the site to be maintainable even though it was going to be fairly app-like in nature. My goal was to build a site that would be dynamic, fun to use, yet not require Javascript mastery to update.

See all of Kevin's great art on display - really that's the whole point. Well, that and the pleasing mouseover effect.

Also, I'm assuming if you're reading this you might also be curious about the inner workings. For now there's good old "view source". There are lots of comments throughout the code. If you'd like to take a tour of how I got Galleriffic to work with two galleries (a very recent upgrade), or how Prettyphoto and Galleriffic can be configured to work together, the full story is all in the code and comments. You'll also see key to the maintainability of the site: the images and descriptions in the gallery are all just an unordered list of links.

Overall, it seems a successful experiment. It doesn't detract from Kevin's art, adds some fun interaction, and it's totally custom.