(Portfolio)cb!/Charlie Williams -Environment Artist
polycounter lvl 14
Hey Guys/Gals
I've Been Browsing the Site for years but Never really posted anything . But i wanted to change all that and start interacting with the community more. So
for my first post I wanted to get you guys thoughts on my portfolio , I recently
did a overhaul on my site and I wanted to get you guys thoughts .
Here's the link :
www.charliebwilliams.com
Tell me what ya think and thanks stay tune for more stuff to come .
cheers
cb!
I've Been Browsing the Site for years but Never really posted anything . But i wanted to change all that and start interacting with the community more. So
for my first post I wanted to get you guys thoughts on my portfolio , I recently
did a overhaul on my site and I wanted to get you guys thoughts .
Here's the link :
www.charliebwilliams.com
Tell me what ya think and thanks stay tune for more stuff to come .
cheers
cb!
Replies
I'm gonna go ahead and agree with Ruz. The splash screen threw me off. shove your work in its visitors faces!
Thanks for taking a look at my stuff!
Ruz
Cool man I hear what ya saying never thought that would throw people off . Just thought it looked nice but can be change to show off work or I can just turned it off and go right into the main portfolio page .
bounchfx
Hey Brent man !
Good to hear from ya thanks for posting I hope all is well out there ,
whats_true
Thanks for Posting
Yea The shots were taken from the wii video captures . So there not translating The best one of the reason why i wanted to get more eyes on the site.( confirms my fear:( ) Most shots were either in game screen grabs view port screen shots . I will look to get some of the lower res higher res .
Site spends a lot of time pre-loading
The page itself is framed into a small resolusion window, thus nothing you present can be seen at current video game resolutions. This makes all your work appear old and dated.
Generally speaking, you have way too much content for anyone to grasp what you are all about. Let's get specific with that
Over forty images in your "archived" section. Most of these images are weird viewport snaps, uncropped
Your character work isn't portfolio material. In fact it all appears to be wips. I'd remove it.
Overall, you have a lot of organization to do. Clean this up to 6-10 finished, best works, and remove all the other junk images.
cholden
Thanks for the feed back ill make those changes
get rid of the flash, and looks like you have 2 portfolio's but one seems to be the splash page.
ahh nevermind, you posted twice.
After waiting for a useless color shifting wallpaper I went to the Portfolio page, which loads for few seconds for FOUR SMALL IMAGES. Then I went to the first image, again loading while there's only a bunch of tiny images.
I pressed backspace, and it started loading AGAIN. Which made no sense because the entire page is still in my cache.
The loading things are just there to look fancy or something? It loads for 3 seconds for every page. I made a quick calculation for you: the IronMan page is about 100KB (24kb for the page, 20x4kb of images) A standard T1 line downloads that in half a second. That's 6 times as fast as your spinner. For bogstandard T1, and I'm pretty sure a gaming company would use something a bit more up to date.
Letting (potential) customers wait is BAD!
As an example of that: I currently have a bunch of pages in separate windows because ctrl-tab is way easier navigation...
As another example:
http://www.charliebwilliams.com/#goto=archived-professional-work
http://www.3dfinlay.com/html/pro.html
yours takes 7 seconds, his takes about 1 second.
And in that one second it actually loads more pixels (about .7 megapixel vs .3 megapixel)
Anway, fix the speed and loading and shit. Other things:
Imagery
-get bigger thumbnails (like 250² instead of 100x70)
-pictures are very low quality, very JPEGgy
-I can't save images to show my manager to tell him to hire you, tough luck for you, no job.
-the fullscreen is useless, it just blows up and blurs stuff
-clean up your images, I dont want to see the grid, the XYZ gizmo, or any softimage menus
Design
-why is it a small centered rectangle? my screen is 1920 wide so It could almost fit 3 images sideways, yet I'm only allowed one and a bit.
-horizontal layed out picures dont work with a standard mouse, vertical layout ftw.
-the site has no personality, it's a very bland grey thing. Sometimes this works (http://www.postmachina.com) usually it doesn't. Yours doesn't.
-get the videos on the same page as the iron man photos.
Assorted
-you have no finished personal project, this shows lack of motivation
-drop the archive, just show a selection of your best pro-work.
Snader:
Thanks for your comments ,
And also for your colorful choice of language lol :thumbup:
But you did raise a couple good points about the loading sorry if it pissed you off lol didn't realize it was loading so slow may need to contact the the company whos hosting the site.
One thing to mention with this site , I'm using a pre-made template site (www.foliosnap.com) So with it theres a bunch of options i can do some are
more hard coded into the site . I did though email them about it and they told
me to send people direct links to the portfolio page like this .
http://www.charliebwilliams.com/#goto=portfolio
Although this is not really most ideal situation. The loading wheel is not something they put there for show it is loading the site and i assume is there
for a reason although again this is not what I want my visitors to see most of the time while on my site .
So there are other template type sites out there that I'm sure give better presentation of video and images while allowing you to see more of them at a higher res .
The non- right click is a featured that is always on also which like u said can be a gift and a curse .
But i have changed the layout of how you browse through the images and I think this will help a bit but Seeing as how I have had this site for many years now it might be time to look into other options .
Keep the post coming
thanks
cb!
I remember seeing this site a few years ago as I was graduating from school, you came in and talked to everybody about getting jobs in the industry and stuff.
It seems like the overlying theme, and my biggest problem with the portfolio is how it is presented. you have a large collection of work, some of it is unfinished or just really simple compared to other things. Also having the images that are screen grabs of both monitors looks sloppy.
It looks like several things were removed from the last time I looked at this site, but it can still be a tad more focused. Sift through some old things and toss them out. You have a lot of wireframes of buildings, which while they all look good, its just a lot of the same thing.
Also, as of right now you have 2 portfolio links, cbw3 portfolio 2010, and portfolio.
This may have already been said, but lose the intro screen. Head straight to the gallery, so people looking at your gallery will see your work first, and judge you on that..not your website.
Hope this helps.