Hey everyone.
I've been working in Russia for a long time and now I've decided to look for fulltime opportunities abroad. I've collected some of the works on the web and I'll be thankful for comments/critique:
http://hundredsofsparrows.com/ttw/
Thanks!
p.s. link to the site comes out from email with cover letter, the site itself isn't public: that's why there's aalmost no personal information there.
Replies
You have some nice work in here!
Try making your navigation bigger, center more to the right and get a proper logo.
The lack of site design doesn't bother me, It's got a simple menu and the images load fast : the work speaks for itself and there is plenty of it.
I saved a few of your illustrations that I really liked and noticed you didn't put your name or email anywhere (file name for example)I would change that.
So much talent and great art coming from Russia nowadays!!!
Anyway, great artworks!
But your site design is bad... that doesn't represent your awesome works.
Do something more simple. Go through some of the portfolio threads here on PC, there are a bunch of great portfolios!
battlecow, that's actually a very nice idea! I'll add my name to images. Some time ago I found myself in situation when I had a bunch of images and had no idea who's an author
AlbinLundahl, you're right, I'll change the first page so it'd look more.. 'welcoming' I guess
Regarding the site's design: to tell the truth I was trying to keep the layout as simple as possible, because as a lead artist I look through lots and lots of portfolio websites and most of them are too complicated, too arty or use broken jquery galleries, when images begin to popup, or open in browser's width instead of full size and so on. The worst case scenarios when artist are thinking that they can do webdesign because in most cases they don't. And then we see terrible typography, terrible layouts and terrible web coding, this worsen the feeling about the actual images. I'm aware that I paint a bit better than do webdesign, so I decided to show the best part. If navigation is inconvenient — that's another matter, I'd like to hear what's wrong with it, but I'm not sure that something is wrong with simplest layout. I'll go and check out some other portfolios but those I've seen before (and I like) differ only in background color
S.
What you have now is fairly functional but incredibly boring. For example, the text "Misc" doesn't interest me at all, yet it contains awesome art. Why not go with a layout that uses labeled images for categories, so I will already have an idea of what "misc" contains? I've also heard that the FIRST thing anyone should see is your current best work, that advice makes quite a lot of sense to me and seems to work well in these portfolios for example (I assume it's fine to link random polycounters portfolios as examples):
http://www.torfrick.com/
http://www.lonewolf3d.com/
http://www.metalliandy.com/
All those layouts are simple and show the art right away, which captures interest. Having your main page just an embedded youtube video with text categories doesn't capture my interest.
Here's also a random blog post I have bookmarked with some basic advice regarding portfolio presentation, you might find some points useful: http://www.noahbradley.com/blog/2011/i-hate-your-portfolio/