Home Technical Talk

Flow of my portfolio?

polycounter lvl 10
Offline / Send Message
Christian Cunningham polycounter lvl 10
I have been reworking my portfolio site. I am working on new art to upload. But as far as the flow what do you guys think? I want people to see my work as soon as they go to my site. I don't want people to have to click a few pages just to see my work. That's why I have it designed this way. Are there to many sub options? Environments, choose one, then that specific one. Or should my environment be in all one big page? Same with assets?


www.chrisc3d.com

Replies

  • Farfarer
    For a start, you've got fixed size layout elements, which means I have to scroll on the main page to see it all. It's currently 1920 pixels wide with a rather strange minimum height of 1055.7 pixels. Neither of which fit inside my browser window nicely. You'll need to see to that, try percentage or em widths. Vertical scrolling is generally fine but horizontal scrolling should never happen.

    All of your text is image based, and it's in a really hard to read ALL CAPS FONT. Don't do that. Change that to regular text. Don't use all caps. Do use a sensible, standard font. I want to be able to copy/paste it and read it easily, it also needs to be able to reflow when I scale the browser window. Images don't let you do any of that.

    None of your email addresses are actual mailto: links. And they're not text so I can't copy/paste the address.

    I'd reword "home" to "portfolio" and move it to the left. It's the most important thing on your site, so it gets top navigational priority after the site title.

    As for the work, there's still two clicks to get to any of your actual artwork pages. So one or two too many there :P

    You probably don't need an individual page for textures, maybe show a couple of samples of the scene textures along with the actual folio pieces (the barrel and rock pieces should have their textures along with them, pick the nicest ones from the environment assets and heave them in there along with it). You do need more pictures of your artwork, though, and in a higher resolution (even to click on to load up a high res version is fine). With wireframes and such.

    I'd ditch the terrain stuff. It's all hidden by a strange rain effect and it doesn't look like much other than some grassy hills.

    Ditch the WIP section, too. Just add a link up with the "home" and "about with a "blog" link or something. Because that's kind of what it is anyway - WIP stuff probably shouldn't be a feature on the main folio gallery at least.

    I'd probably not bother with sub-sections and just give a thumbnail of each piece on the first page. It should be clear enough what the user is clicking on.

    And, personally, I hate that lightbox stuff. But that's a personal preference...
  • Bartalon
    Offline / Send Message
    Bartalon polycounter lvl 12
    What Farfarer said. You can't expect people to view your Website with a maximized browser, assuming they are viewing it on a PC at all. Ideally it should shift its formatting based on the browser size. I believe the term is "responsive web design."

    I would recommend a sans-serif typeface, as they are cleaner and easier to see, especially when at smaller font sizes, but that's just my opinion.

    • Splash Screen & General Content
    As stated already, you basically have two splash screens. "Environments" then a sub-category page before the viewer gets to see anything. You have a mix of textured and untextured content which I feel devalues your overall portfolio. Put the untextured stuff in your WIP section or remove it entirely.

    • Environments
    I would nix the terrain stuff
    I would move the temple stuff to WIP

    • Textures
    Get rid of your hand painted stuff. If you want to showcase that as part of your skill set I would recommend doing daily studies.
    The other textures are disjointed. What do they go to? One of your environments? Group everything from the same project on the same page so everything is cohesive.

    • Assets
    You might want to consider getting rid of this category altogether. The car looks nice but it's not textured and there's no wireframe so there's no telling about the quality there.

    The boat looks to have some great potential if you followed through and completed its textures!

    • Work in Progress
    I wasn't expecting to be taken to a separate Website when clicking on this banner. It's grouped the same as the other three so I was expecting more sub-menu items. I think this should be moved to a lower profile spot on your page. If the viewer is interested enough from your main content, he'll poke around your page and check out your WIP stuff on his own.

    • General Thoughts
    Avoid Crazybump for generating normal maps. Try sticking to high poly sculpts and bake out proper normal maps. You'll find your texture quality will improve considerably. I'm not suggesting Crazybump should never be used, but for a portfolio piece you probably don't want to use software that lets you cut corners and sacrifice quality.

    I like that you show how much time it took you for each project. I rarely ever see that, and it's a nice perspective on things. Usually when I see fantastic portfolio pieces I just have to guess how long it might have taken.

    The current functionality of the Lightbox feature is poor. There are no arrows to cycle through all your content, which forces the viewer to X out or click away after every single picture. I would also recommend ditching Lightbox, or getting a better version with more user friendliness.

    You have no wire frames or triangle counts in any of your work (I see you have them on your WIP page, but people aren't going to look there first). This makes me somewhat skeptical of your work: your models could be hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of triangles and no one would know the difference. It's not difficult to create a model, but to show that you understand how to optimize is important.

    Move your email to the top of the page.

    Using images for content that could easily be text makes it hard for search engines to find you so they can add you to search results. You may want to look up Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Not to mention editing the text inside a .htm file is much faster and easier than opening up Photoshop and editing whichever file holds your text information.

    You may want to condense your list of programs on your About page to only those with which you are comfortable/proficient using. No one really cares how long you've used a particular software package so long as you know how to use it effectively.

    • Nitpicks
    The LinkedIn icons on your About page and at the bottom of the page are inconsistent.

    Pure white on black is actually somewhat of a strain on the eyes, try using 70% gray instead.

    Lots of people are accustomed to the major banner at the top of a page being a way to return you to the splash page of the Website. For instance, no matter which screen you're at on Amazon.com, if you clicked on their banner at the top left, it would take you to their splash page.
  • Christian Cunningham
    Offline / Send Message
    Christian Cunningham polycounter lvl 10
    thanks guys I will re work some stuff and post it up
Sign In or Register to comment.