I am about to embark on a jquery journey I have not ever done. I will be developing a site that has one objective : to display over 300 uncategorized images (artwork). I'm just trying to think about the best way to go about displaying all these images in an easy to navigate, elegant way. I could use thumbnails and lightbox, but that's boring. I want to get inventive! Any cool ideas?
I wouldn't say that 300 images is a "ton" by any stretch.
Go visit photo sites like Flickr, SmugMug, and Picasa. Find the websites for wedding and journalist photographers. See what they're doing. If you can't figure out how to navigate their site in 10 seconds, stay away from similar site designs.
What's the objective of the people coming to view the images? Is it just browsing, or will they be looking for particular images? Are the images grouped into themes or artist or something? You have to build a navigation system that makes it easy for your users to achieve their goal!
Perhaps, if its more browsing some creative theme of images I wonder if you could come up with a scheme that lets users find their way between images naturally. Perhaps have several paths through the images, that when you view one you have a couple of options for where to 'go' next. Almost mimic the kind of browsing you might experience in an art gallery?