Portfolio crit and feedback requested.

ArtUnitFive

Just having a look around on the forums I'm already picking up a lot of useful suggestions and ideas on how to improve my portfolio but nothing is quite as good as the direct approach right?

To that end; http://artunitfive.squarespace.com/ All feedback and criticism is welcome.

Thanks guys.

Adam Chilton

Hi,

Some great work on your portfolio, however it requires too many clicks to get to the good stuff.

I'd advise making your work more prominent, rather than a picture of yourself. Try making the first thing you see, your favourite/strongest piece of work, so as to grab the interest of the viewer. You can probably leave the stuff about yourself more in the back end of the website, and concentrate on showing your skills first of all.

Cheers,
Adam

steppan

Fully agree with Adam there. Some good stuff but a little frustrating to navigate.

just a couple of things you could easily tweak which would go a long way.

1) As Adam mentioned you want the person viewing your portfolio to land straight at your strongest piece and be instantly amazed. If they want to know more about you they will go there themselves.

2) You '3D artwork' and '2D artwork' sections ought to have their own page where you can see the sub sections as images.

When I was on there I didn't know what I was looking for, so the title of your projects mean nothing to me. The first thing I did was to click where it says '3D artwork' expecting it to take me to an overview page of all your 3D art works where I can see a small image of each project. From there I can choose the one which interest me more.

3) This is something that I have found to be a recurring theme when reading threads about people's portfolio's: Less clicks is better.
I would be tempted to get rid of the slideshow when you click on an image. The little x in the corner is not very obvious when viewing the images and it leaves you feeling a little frustrated because you half expect to be able to click outside the picture to exit the slideshow (like facebook's picture viewer) but instead it just loads the next image.
Maybe instead you can have your images in big right away on the project page so that the person viewing your portfolio can just scroll down the page to see your work instead of clicking all over the place.


The main thing you have to consider when creating your portfolio is that the person you want viewing it has very little time, has loads of other portfolios to view and probably would rather be doing something else. So you have to make their job as easy and painless as possible; and you need to find a way to help them navigate your work as quickly and efficiently as possible (that means less clicks to get to the good stuff)

ArtUnitFive

Thanks Adam, yeah I was picking that up from a lot of the other portfolios I've looked at on here. You're right a strong piece of work would be a much better way to sell myself than my ugly mug

ArtUnitFive

Thanks for the input Steppan, good feedback. I'll look into what I can do to ease navigation. I paid for squarespace and utterly regret it now, It's not the most versatile service out there and making meaningful changes to the way navigation works can be a challenge, I shall certainly try though.

steppan

I've never used it so can't give any pointers unfortunately, but I have tried a wide variety of free sites and I've found www.weebly.com to be by far the best one, it's the one I currently use and I find it to be really versatile and well worth using if you are looking for something easy to use and free (you have the option to pay and it opens up even more features too)

Somarion

Like the others said, navigation was really annoying for me. I really liked your animation!

ArtUnitFive

Hi all, back again.

Been a busy week or so but I spent a bit of time improving my portfolio, Having it drop you straight onto the money and doing away with some of the more tedious navigation.

It still needs some work, I like the layouts the individual project pages have but I need to work out a way to turn off the annoying gallery view when you click and image.

https://artunitfive.squarespace.com/

Again, any further crits of feedback is more than welcome, thanks for all the help so far.