Web portfolio critique (was meant for Treehouse Designer opening)

Hey Kyle, thanks man!

Thanks a lot, Darren! I used quite a bit of jquery on my nav bar... what I think you are referring to is smooth scrolling or jQuery smooth scrolling when clicking an anchor/internal link, and CSS Tricks has an article on it here: http://css-tricks.com/snippets/jquery/smooth-scrolling/. There is also lots of other information on getting this effect on stackoverflow and other sites if you do a Google search. It is really just a jQuery scroll animation on the nav link click event.

I also had a couple other cool jQuery features on the navigation if you're interested. One is shrinking the header as you start to scroll down:

//Shrink main header when scrolling down
$(window).scroll(function() {
    var windscroll = $(window).scrollTop();
    if (windscroll >= 138) {
        $('.main-header').addClass('shrink-header');
    } else {
        $('.main-header').removeClass('shrink-header');
    }
}).scroll();

Another is changing the active link as you reach a new section when scrolling down (i.e. when you reach the About section, the About link becomes active/bold):

//Change active link based on scroll position
$(window).scroll(function() {
    var windscroll = $(window).scrollTop();
    if (windscroll >= 138) {
        $('h1[id$="section"]').each(function(i) {
            var offset = $(this).offset();
            // console.log(offset, offset.top, windscroll+1);
            if (offset.top <= windscroll + 1) {
                $('.selected').removeClass('selected');
                $('.main-nav ul li a').eq(i).addClass('selected');
            }
        });
    } else {
        $('.selected').removeClass('selected');
        $('.main-nav ul li a:first').addClass('selected');
    }
}).scroll();

Changing the active link when scrolling down was tough... I tried using jQuery's position method initially, but it actually didn't work in webkit browsers... offset is what did the trick though. Where you see windscroll + 1, that was just me trying to get the positioning just right when scrolling.

Darren, I hope this helps, and thanks again for the feedback!

Good deal, glad I could help Darren! If you know CSS, then I would suggest picking up jQuery first because it's syntax uses a lot of the same CSS selectors... that definitely helped me A LOT when picking it up at first.

Hey Josiah Dawley, thank you so much! I have definitely been learning about design theory and principles over the last couple years outside of Treehouse, and I tried to incorporate a lot of that learning into my site as well - I'm glad you noticed man!

About the logo, I was mulling around with several different designs before finally settling on that one. It definitely is hard to incorporate J's for some reason! My middle initial is actually D for Douglas, and I tried some designs incorporating an uppercase D as the dot for the J trying to get all the initials in there. It looked good with some designs I came up with, but not really with the script typeface I chose for my final logo unfortunately.

Josiah, I really appreciate the feedback and thanks again!

Hey James Barnett, thanks for the feedback! After taking a second look, I agree with you about the text layout to some extent, especially in the About section and the section prior to that where there is lots of text... What would you recommend for the text layout? Multi-column layout, additional illustrations to break it up, less copy or something else? Also, what do you think is wrong with the line lengths? They are on the shorter end of the recommended 45-75 characters per line (I think they are around 55-60 or so), but they look good to me.

Thanks again for checking out my site. I appreciate it, sir!