So for the past week, between work and the Olympics, I started working on the portfolio section of my beta site. I figured that I could draw inspiration from the Olympics and get a boost in pursuing my goals and all the good stuff.
I purposely have not yet made the link available from the home page because I don’t want new visitors to stumble upon my site thinking that the active link to my portfolio leads to a complete collection of my work. You may, however, manually type in the URI and see what’s been done so far. If you don’t know what the URI is, there is a hint on the home page’s navigation.
I haven’t figured out exactly how to lay out the page yet. I’ve designed probably five or six web portfolio sites, always trying to figure out the most efficient and logical way to navigate. My criteria for the layout include:
- how easy it is for new visitors to understand how to navigate within the portfolio section;
- how the work is displayed against the rest of the layout;
- how accessible it is for browsers without/that have turned off style sheets, JavaScript, and other applications;
- how it would translate onto mobile device displays;
- and what kind of experience most visitors would get from viewing this site.
I’m trying to avoid laying out boxes (or squares of “transparencies”) into neat little rectangles. I’ve done that before and even I’m getting a little bored. I’m trying to let the function take care of the form.
And it doesn’t look like I’ve done much so far, but I’ve actually fixed the code behind the navigation so that it works in more than one page with the same code, as well as allowing it to work (more or less) in JavaScript-disabled browsers.
Comments on the background image?
Flush.
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 23:37 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Definitely like the picture.
I’m digging the picture too.
It’s tricky making your own portfolio page and it’s good that you’ve made criteria from which to design (I should have done that myself), but I think it might be helpful to not be so harsh with yourself and just enjoy the fact that you get to be your own client for this project.
As well as I know you, it’s my belief that you may be thinking into the underlying ideas a bit too much and getting yourself bogged-down in defining the philosophy and intentions behind everything.
My recommendation, and it’s only a recommendation, is open up illustrator or photoshop and just have at it. I think the only criteria you should keep are:
ease of navigation
integration with layout
browser compatibility
Do people really view graphic design portfolios from mobile devices? I may be totally wrong, but I believe that is something that should only be considered by 0.01% of websites out there.
And I think it’s obvious that the feeling you want people to walk away with is “I just looked at Ivan Lam’s work.” I personally don’t like portfolio sites that are an experience; I prefer them to be a more of a frame that does not detract from content.
Just my thoughts.
Sam,
No yeah, I totally agree with all your points! I AM thinking too much but as you might know, I can’t really help it.
For the most part, I’ve adopted the philosophy of “just do it” or “just start playing around with it,” but this is one of those projects where it would become completely annoying to recode if I change my mind; so I want to get it as close to my desired layout as possible before I code it.
No, I don’t think people really look at it on mobile devices, but I want to keep my options open with my career as a web designer/programmer(or whatever you call it) b/c I sort of enjoy coding as much as designing, so I want to practice coding for mobile devices, just like my TP107 portfolio (/tp107).
And I know the page as of right now (9/5/08) is still just a basic frame, but I’ve been doing layouts on AI, so hopefully I’ll get something more up there soon!
Thanks for your comments, Sam! I really appreciate it!