New portfolio, redesigned
polycounter lvl 3
After having posted my new portfolio here some days back and gotten a heap of feedback, I redesigned it pretty much from scratch - same basic design idea but everything remade to work better. Would be very interested in any feedback!
Here's the url:
http://www.ivarhill.com
I focused heavily on the actual content here, with large pictures and just a smaller explanatory text beneath. This time I also use no complex zooming scripts to adapt to lower resolutions, but play it safe and use tried and tested methods. Hopefully it will work better than the last one!
Here's the url:
http://www.ivarhill.com
I focused heavily on the actual content here, with large pictures and just a smaller explanatory text beneath. This time I also use no complex zooming scripts to adapt to lower resolutions, but play it safe and use tried and tested methods. Hopefully it will work better than the last one!
Replies
This kind of design belongs to a company, not a portfolio. I found it confusing at first, since I was looking for your art. Most people don't care about the text until they see the eye candy.
I dunno, thats my opinion. Cool stuff man.
I suppose I swing towards designing this style of website as I have a background in design and web design, and want my portfolio to reflect these areas of knowledge as well. As is shown in the categories I've put up it's not purely a 3D art portfolio but also caters to design - and it was my desire for the portfolio itself to showcase this.
I suppose my intention has been to make something that feels like my own rather than doing a simple galllery, something I feel I've spent time on and can feel confident in. But maybe you're right and it shouldn't be the focus here.
I've always been doing art in this style though, putting lots of effort into presentation beyond from the art itself - I know this can often be frowned upon ("focus on the art!") but I am of the personal opinion that this can be art in itself, and spending time on these things very much reflects me as an artist. I feel I wanted a slice of that in the site itself.
Please do tell me if you think I'm completely in the wrong here and need to rethink - I am always looking for insight from others.
If you want to show off website design, have a new site for that, or a section dedicated to it. OR do the opposite, have a separate website for art.
You could probably get away with this kind of design, if you had tons of MIND blowing work and tutorials. But right now, no, it isn't working.
Again, my opinion. Maybe someone else can be more helpful.
So just decide, do you want to be known for your 3d art or web design ? right now its more like a web design showcase, and impractical one to be honest.
"I've always been doing art in this style though, putting lots of effort into presentation beyond from the art itself - I know this can often be frowned upon ("focus on the art!") but I am of the personal opinion that this can be art in itself, and spending time on these things very much reflects me as an artist. I feel I wanted a slice of that in the site itself."
Nothing makes me cringe more than seeing good art ruined by over the top presentation , shows insecurity on the artist, now when it happens on mediocre or begginer art , makes the cringe 2x more powerfull. Spending too much time on presentation isnt an art itself, its giving bells and whistles to something that should stand on its own on a dark grey background , but thats my opinion.
Just find your focus and cater to that, right now you are all over the place, and whatever you think that "its a form of art" etc is pretty pretentious imo.
It's a good question and something I have probably been struggling with for a long time. I guess my biggest problem is that I have a hard time seeing myself striving for a career first - in other words, when creating something like a portfolio I do what I personally feel reflects me, not necessarily what is the best at giving me a job. And I might need to change that, for sure.
Joao Sapiro:
I actually fully agree with you here, but I suppose I have a different definition of 'over the top presentation'. Throughout the process of making this site I constantly strived to make the presentation simple and clean as to not distract from the art pieces - but perhaps not enough.
We do disagree on whether presentation can be an artform however - sorry if I feel pretentious as it is definitely not my intention, but I personally feel that it's incredibly important in actual game development.
A well-presented and polished game (in terms of things like typography, box art, UI elements, etc, etc.) can make a huge difference in my opinion to one that does not focus at all on these things, and I suppose it is this mindset I tried to convey in this site.
Again though, it is really not my desire to come off as pretentious and perhaps these views easily come across as such - and in that case I would want to change the way I present things. It is definitely much harder when I right now feel like it does not really matter what I'd want to 'be known for', as you put it. I just don't think much about these things I suppose.
I'm not sure quite what to do here, as I do feel very passionate about polish, presentation and design but at the same time also want to move forward in 3D art.
http://ivarhill.com/ivar-hill---portfolio-concept.html
Do you think this is the kind of thing that would work better?
Having thought about things a bit more, I think that what I'm really looking for is a position at a very small, likely indie company which would give me the room to stretch out, beyond 3D including promo work, box art etc. - this interests me much more than specializing in a specific direction at a large-scale developer.
Do you still think that the above works better if that is what I seek?
Slip in a link to your resume and I think you're in a much better direction than the first two versions. The links turn near white when you hover over them, though. Which I'm assuming is temporary. I'd suggest a simple hue/saturation change for those, personally.
:thumbup:
I understand the other site had a lot of interesting things going on, and I can imagine it took a fair bit of work, but in my opinion, trash it. If you decide you want to move in the direction of web design later, remake a new more streamlined and effective design that doesn't feel muddled with 3D art.
Even if you want to promote web design on the side, or as a sub skill, I would consider redesigning a site that would reflect more positively on your skills.
http://www.ivarhill.com/new
All that remains is to include my resume and fix the overlays when hovering over the thumbnails, they are nonexistant/broken right now - otherwise it is pretty much done.
I'd definitely appreciate feedback on the pieces themselves - do they hold the same degree of quality or are there some I should remove?
The mouse cursor changing to a little hand is the widely accepted sign that an image is clickable. Stick to that. Everything else is superfluous.
TLDR : image rollover effects are pointless and dated
Also, it doesn't make much sense to me that clicking on an image opens a lightbox ... linking to all the other images of the site. I'd rather get to see a nice collection of images related to that asset, then hit back to go back to the main page to view the next cool thing.
As seen here :
http://www.hazardousarts.com/
Also, some viewers are okay with lightboxes ... but some really dislike them. Yet everybody is cool with plain old image linking. I would suggest playing it safe, sticking to regular images and gallery pages instead of using fancy plugins.
Good luck !
I definitely agree. The gun doesn't add to the appeal.
Disagree with the above post. I'd say its the weakest piece.
Overall, I like the improvement a lot !
Good point regarding the overlays - I thought I'd use those as a simple and clean way to provide some more information (polycount etc.) but perhaps it is indeed better to remove them altogether.
As for using a lightbox, I personally dislike them - but one of my previous portfolio revisions had people complain about plain image linking so I thought I'd change that. Maybe that's the best after all, that is what I personally prefer, anyway.
As for the gun, I will take that away, thanks for the input.
With all due respect, if they complain of that for a 3d art portfolio they have no idea what they are talking about and i would avoid their "advice"
Just a simple gallery with image linking man , the less clicks the more potential clients will like you.
http://www.ivarhill.com/new
Only way it could get better IMO is with a forward and back button on scaled up images, instead of a redirect to a new page. JMO. might be more work than its worth
Still, much better than the initial versions. Well done on incorporating feedback!
Thanks for the feedback and advice all!
Other than that, I think the site is fine. Some of the comments were harsh IMO but I never saw the original layout you had. Sometimes it's very hard to do this, but try reducing the amount of images you are showing. Just show your best and reduce the amount of clicks we have to do to get to see it.