Let's play "Here is my portfolio. How does it suck"

Steve Schulze

It looks like I going to need to be freelancing for a while, so it's time to finally get off my butt and do something about this portfolio.

http://www.jackablade.com

I've been rather lax in keeping it up to date, so a priority is obviously to get some new work in there, but I'm wondering what else I need to do to hammer into shape.

Cheers

Pookhan

In terms of your site layout, it would be much clearer if you had thumbnails of each project rather than everything scrolling down. It seems more like a blog. If you have your homepage as just a menu with each project as a thumbnail underneath, it's easier for someone to pick a project to look at. Check these links to see what I mean:

http://artbywiktor.com/

http://www.ladyknowles.co.uk/

That's my thinking anyway, but it's just a suggestion.

ysalex

Hi Stephen -


My main problem with your site is that the content is given a very small column, looks like less than 500px. There is a lot of waste going to that right side column, and to be honest I did not even notice that there was anything written over there on my first scroll though.

I think Pookhan is right about his suggestion for tiles because they are clean, but I will add the caviat that these only really work for one-off pieces. If you have worked on cool projects (looks like you have) you do not get the chance to show them off, really you will just be hoping that someone will click the correct thumbnail and lead them through.

Good luck with the freelancing!

DWalker

I'd have to agree about the layout. I also prefer placing projects each to their own page, and for reasonably sized thumbnails to open a new window rather than the current zooming box thing that's currently in place.

I'd have to say that your greatest weakness is your textures. They - for the most part - appear to be fairly simple diffuse-only maps. Even with cartoon-style characters modern characters tend to have much more complex and detailed textures - more Pixar than Tex Avery.

Don't be afraid to cull your work, and remember to cull each time you update your site. Quality, not quantity is your key here. You will be judged by your WEAKEST piece, so 2-3 great pieces are better than 10-20 mediocre ones.

Your strength seems to be in character modelling, so I'd probably focus on the character models.

Remember to put your contact information on all of your images, but don't let it obscure the images. (Poor Cynder's legs are cut-off at the knees.)

Your resume page really needs a better format; everything is shoved over to the left side and it relies upon vertical spacing to provide any structure. Use tabs/spaces to indicate headings & subheadings, and different font sizes as well. The current font for everything is too small. Any good resume-writing site should give you some samples of well-formatted layouts. Your downloadable version suffers from the same problem. Also, most downloadable resumes are in a portable format (almost entirely PDF now) rather than in MS Office's proprietary DOC format. This is especially true for artists, where they are as likely to use Macs as PCs. Finally, your resume should fit on 2 pages; you have a few lines on the 3rd page.

Your navigation bar should really fit on a single line; there's no good reason to place "Resume" by itself at the bottom.

LMP

First Impression. They Grey Text on the Dark Grey Background is hard to read... more coming soon.

JohnnyRaptor

Your art needs to be bigger. work up your thumbnails, play with colours to keep things interesting on first impression. Right now on entering, i see a youtube video and one grayscale thumbnail on a grey background. Scrolling down, i see another youtube video and tiny text and another grayscale thumbnail.

Not a lot of visual input to keep me interested.

If majority of your work is highres untextures assets, try and get them rendered with some interesting lighting and try and introduce some colour.

dont mean to come across harsh, just dropping my first impression down in text.

LMP

Your work is not bad, but, you need to do some curating. At the moment is very scattershot. I can't really tell what you want to do. Your presentation could be improved, if you're going to use viewport screenshots, you need to use lighting beyond just the simple default. Ideally, you should present models in an engine, they'd likely look nicer.

Steve Schulze

Good stuff guys. You've given me plenty to consider here.

A small part of my problem is that I do work on a lot of quite different stuff professionally. Working out how to create a more focused feel when I've got a everything from a giant animatronic gorilla to a low res aeroplane model might be a challenge.

jacob thomas

Have a read through this article by Jon Jones. He pretty much nails it and being an outsource manager he is the type of guy who will be looking at your site for freelancing.
There is also a CrunchCast or 2 that go over in detail some pretty awesome advice on websites/folios.

Kn1ghtHavvk

I'll jump in on this. I know my site is bad but i'd liekt o hear some feedback on it none the less. check me out at http://jeffboob.wordpress.com/

CarlK3D

I recommend you make your own thread Kn1ghtHawk if you want critiques on your work