From: Philip Rous
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

President Hrabowski and I cordially invite you to participate in the Commencement Ceremonies of the Undergraduate and Graduate School Programs. Doctoral and Master’s degrees will be conferred on Wednesday, May 21, 2014 at 10:00 a.m. in the UMBC Retriever Activities Center (RAC). Baccalaureate degrees will be conferred on Thursday, May 22, 2014 at 1:00 p.m. at the 1st Mariner Arena. As you know, these events mean a great deal to our students, their parents, and guests, so I hope you will make a special effort to share in their celebrations. You are welcome to participate in both ceremonies.

REGALIA

Faculty and staff who still want to order regalia may do so through May 5, with a late fee of $25. Regalia cannot be ordered after May 5.

Regalia will be available for pick-up Wednesday, May 7 through Friday, May 16. Faculty and staff must pick up regalia at the Bookstore during this period. If you have any questions, please call Gail Dupree at the Bookstore, at x 53904.

GRADUATE COMMENCEMENT – May 21 at 10 a.m.

LINE UP: Faculty/staff line up will be on court 1, in the multi-purpose gym (except mentors of Doctoral students, see below). Please enter the RAC at the main entrance. Line up will be directly downstairs, where light refreshments will be available. Faculty and staff may leave their belongings in this area, which will be monitored by a Student Marshal.

Mentors of graduating doctoral students are asked to line up with their students in the basement of the Sondheim Building, not in the multi-purpose RAC gym.

The procession begins promptly at 9:50 a.m.

R.S.V.P.: If you have not already done so, please be sure to R.S.V.P. if you plan to participate in the procession. For planning and seating purposes, we need the name of each faculty member who will process and any special mobility needs you may have. Click on this link to respond by Monday, May 5, 2014.

UNDERGRADUATE COMMENCEMENT – May 22 at 1 p.m.

LUNCH AND BUSES: You are invited for lunch at 11:00 a.m. at the 1st before the Undergraduate Commencement. Bus transportation from UMBC to the Arena will also be provided, leaving at 10:30 a.m. for lunch and 11:30 a.m. for ceremony only.

LINE UP: For the Undergraduate Ceremony, faculty and staff should line up at 12:15 p.m. at the 1st Mariner Arena. The procession begins promptly at 12:30.

R.S.V.P.: If you have not already done so, please be sure to R.S.V.P. by Monday, May 5, 2014, if you plan to participate in the procession for the Undergraduate ceremony. Click on this link to reply. Following is the information we need for planning and seating purposes.

• Your name, whether you will come for lunch, and, if you need a bus to the Arena, whether you want the 10:30 or 11:30 a.m. bus. You will need the 10:30 bus if you come for lunch.

• Please let us know if you have any special mobility needs. The 10:30 bus will be equipped with a lift.

For additional information about the 2014 May Commencement Ceremonies, please visit the Commencement website. We look forward to your participation in the Ceremonies.

If you’re a freelance designer or if you’re looking for your next design job, a portfolio of work is essential. Clients and employers want to see your capabilities and form a quick impression. If you don’t have a portfolio yet, you may want to start with the course How to Make a Website on Treehouse in which I show the process of building a portfolio website step by step. If you don’t have any work yet, here’s a post about how to get web design experience.

On Treehouse, you can learn how build a portfolio with the course How to Make a Website.

Assuming you do have some work, it’s important to organize it all in one place. Here are five tips that can help you create the perfect portfolio website.

1. Dress for the Job You Want

The adage “dress for the job you want, not the one you have” applies to design portfolios. If you want to do web work, then make sure that’s exactly what you’re highlighting on your portfolio. Furthermore, if you’re just one designer or a small team, focusing on a specific market niche can be highly beneficial. When all of your clients share a common industry, it’s easier to anticipate their needs, even before a meeting. For example, if you want to specialize in a particular vertical (such as websites for apartment complexes or doctors offices), then you should highlight that type of work.

Free trial on Treehouse: Do you want to learn the design skills that employers want? Click here to try a free 14-day trial on Treehouse.

Everyone has a mixed bag of experience, so even if you don’t feel like a designer, you’ve probably done some design work. If someone browsing your site is looking for a good web designer, they may not want to see all of your video work, T-shirts you made, and so on (unless, of course, you’re known for that and you want to do more of it).

This is also true if you’re trying to transition to a new focus. If you’ve done a lot of web design, but you want to design logos instead, then isolate any prior graphic design work you’ve done. In the design industry, perception is reality, so if you’re able to show good logo design work, then people will take your word for it that you are indeed a logo designer.

2. Edit Yourself

At first, it might seem like you want to showcase everything you’ve ever done so that you can demonstrate your breadth of skill. This is usually a mistake; less is more.

Instead, it’s better to create a potent mix of your best work. When people are looking for a designer, they don’t have time to dig through hundreds of portfolios and then subsequently dig through all of your work. Impressions are formed instantly, so a small selection of quality should be front and center. Your portfolio should still be you, but only the best you.

Jessica Hische is a letterer, illustrator, and type designer with a massive portfolio. In this case, it’s a good thing.

I said including everything is usually a mistake. However, if you know that all of your work is at a very high level of quality, then filling the screen with a huge amount of stellar pieces can create a powerful effect. Jessica Hische is a great example of this; her self-described “unabridged portfolio” overwhelms the page (in a good way) and leaves a lasting impression.

3. Tell a Story

Every piece you choose to include in your portfolio should tell a story, either visually or with words. If you’ve made a website for a local food truck that’s known for gourmet quality food, the aesthetics should correspond and fit the message. Websites are a communication medium, so clients want to see work that really says something.

Beyond the visuals, you may want to consider turning each portfolio piece into a case study. If website visitors want to know more, allow them to click through to additional detail for each piece. Tell them about the needs of each client, what problems each client tried to overcome, and how the solutions you provided worked. Carry visitors’ interest by telling a short story that has a beginning and a conclusion, and be sure to underscore how you played the role of a problem-solver.

4. Don’t Overthink It

Business owners understand that time is their most precious resource. They don’t want to waste time drowning in dozens of your portfolio pieces or dealing with complicated navigation.

Your portfolio should maintain a crystal-clear intent throughout the entire site. Your work should be visible immediately and it should only be your best work. Don’t slow visitors down by getting too creative with the navigation or trying something you’ve never done before. Chances are, it won’t impress them. Instead, go for something simple and elegant. In fact, your portfolio site itself should really just fade into the background and act as a frame for the work you’re presenting.

It’s also important to make sure a portfolio site works well across popular browsers. If visitors are browsing the web in the previous version of Internet Explorer and your website looks broken to them, then you’ve made a poor impression; they’re not going to give it another shot in Chrome or Firefox. The simpler you make your site, the easier it will be to resolve any cross-browser issues.

5. Keep It Fresh

Crafting a great portfolio is like gardening. Every so often you need to prune and selectively remove pieces that are no longer representative of your best work. You also need to make sure you plant the seeds for new work and look for opportunities to expand your portfolio.

Every time you work on a new project, you’re not only making work for a client, you’re also potentially creating a new portfolio piece. If the money or the project isn’t very motivating, you should still make sure you’re injecting quality work. That way, you’ll have an easier time landing gigs you do want to work on with better pay.

Share Your Tips

This is not an exhaustive guide, but hopefully these five tips help you create a more perfect portfolio. If you have any tips of your own, please share them in the comments!

The post 5 Tips for Creating the Perfect Web Design Portfolio appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

It's pretty common to use SVG within an anchor link or otherwise "click/tappable thing" on a web page. It's also increasingly common that the SVG is inline <svg>, because it's often nice having the SVG in the DOM since you can style it with CSS and script it with JS and such. But what does that mean for click events?

A link with an SVG icon in it might be like this:

<a href="#0" data-data="something">
      <svg ... >
         <rect ...>
      <svg>
    </a>

Now you want to bind a click event to that anchor link. In jQuery:

$("a").on("click", function(event) {
      
       // `this` will always be the <a>
      console.log($(this).data("data"));
      // "something"
    
    });

That will work perfectly fine. Note there is a data-* attribute on the anchor link. That's probably there specifically for JavaScript to access and use. No problem at all how we have it written right now, because within the anonymous function we have bound, this will always be that anchor link, which has that attribute available. Even if you use event delegation and call some function who-knows-where to handle it, this will be that anchor link and you can easily snag that data-* attribute.

But let's say you're going to rock some raw JavaScript event delegation:

document.addEventListener('click', doThing);
    
    function doThing(event) {
      // test for an element match here
    }

You don't have an easy reference to your anchor link there. You'll need to test the event.target to see if it even is the anchor link. But in the case of our SVG-in-a-link, what is that target?

It could either be:

1. The <a>
2. The <svg>
3. The <rect>

You might just have to check the tagName of the element that was clicked, and if you know it was a sub-element, move up the chain:

document.addEventListener('click', doThing);
    
    function doThing(event) {
      var el;
      
      // we can check the tag type, and if it's not the <a>, move up.
      if (event.target.tagType == "rect") {
        // move up TWICE
        el = event.target.parentElement.parentElement;
      } else if (event.target.tagType == "svg") {
        // move up ONCE
        el = event.target.parentElement;
      } else {
        el = event.target;
      }
      console.log(el.getAttribute("data-data"));
    }

That's pretty nuts though. It's too tied to the HTML and SVG structure. Toss a <g> in there around some <path>s, which is a perfectly fine thing to do for grouping, and it breaks. Or the tagType is path not a rect, or any other DOM difference.

Personally I've been preferring some CSS solutions.

One way is to lay a pseudo element over top the entire anchor element, so that the clicks are guaranteed to be on the anchor element itself, nothing inside it:

a {
      position: relative;
    }
    a::after {
      content: "";
      top: 0;
      left: 0;
      width: 100%;
      height: 100%;
    }

This seems to work pretty well too:

a > svg {
      pointer-events: none;
    }

pointer-events typically doesn't work in IE (it does in 11+, but not lower), but it actually does when applied to SVG, in IE 9+, which is the version of IE that supports SVG anyway.

Here's a Pen with the issue demonstrated and the fixes:

See the Pen owyFj by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Point is

If you're using SVG in a click target, be very careful you're getting the right element in JavaScript, and if you have trouble, consider a CSS cover.

Links with Inline SVG, Staying on Target with Events is a post from CSS-Tricks

W3C has published the April 2014 edition of Standards for Web Applications on Mobile, an overview of the various technologies developed in W3C that increase the capabilities of Web applications, and how they apply more specifically to the mobile context.

A deliverable of the HTML5Apps project, this edition of the document includes changes and additions since January 2014, including a new set of features highlighting what tools the Web platform offers in serving user security and privacy.

Learn more about the Web and Mobile Interest Group.