I am teaching a workshop at Fort Hays State University in about 3 weeks on a component for Flash called SlideShowPro (see the poster below). Slideshow Pro is a wonderful tool and component for Flash which allows you to easily make interactive slideshows inside of Flash. A tool that I learned about after my undergraduate degree, this was immensely helpful in building a portfolio website for myself and being able to easily create portfolio presentations in one day or less which actually helped land me an internship in Chicago. Check out all of the features available over at the website for SlideShowPro.
Since that time I have moved on to WordPress and Javascript lightbox style tools for presenting my portfolio to prospective clients and employers. The versatility of WordPress makes it easy for me to update my website and write articles such as this on the fly. However, the tools in a designers bag of tricks is something that needs to be never ending so I still keep tabs on the latest developments of SSP (when I first bought it you had to hack it just to get it to play an FLV) and still use it quite often for a variety of different things. So, if you're a young designer that is exploring the wide world of portfolio tools that are out there, and there are many, or just an old dog trying to learn some new tricks to keep up with us youngsters be sure to check out SSP when you get some free time. There are a variety of different ways that it can be used and there is a ton of support and example documents available on their website. Some of it is a little bit cheesy, but if you use the tool right, the possibilities are endless. What I have gotten the most use out of is basically using it to externally load images on the fly without having to write a ton of loadMovie() scripts. Here are a few examples of it in use that I find quite nice:
