Artstation portfolio VS Your own website

Johnnynapalmsc

Hey guys,

So I am starting to seriously apply and look for a 3D artist position in the gaming and film industry. 

I currently have my own website: www.jroscinas.com
and Artstation portfolio: https://www.artstation.com/artist/johnnrosh (I need to add a few more artworks here still)

Would you suggest I use my own website or the artstation portfolio when applying for jobs? I am also working on my reel, which should be finished soon.

Thanks for reading, and any advice is appreciated

Stinger88

Your website out shines your artstation by a long way as it stands. I'd use that if you are going to use one.

That said. Artstation is acceptable as a portfolio site for the employers at our studio.

EarthQuake

I get a security error when trying to go to your website, in both Firefox and Chrome.

Personally I dropped my website and now use AS exclusively. It's a lot easier to maintain and keep up to date. The Pro account stuff gives you extra control too, though I haven't had time to play with it yet.

Johnnynapalmsc

Cool thanks, and yeah I fixed the link for my site 

slosh

I tried your personal site and got the splash page but none of the links worked.  Couldn't see any of your work.

pior

The custom website looks good, but remove the darkening of the thumbnails on mouseover. The effect is 100% pointless and is actually playing against you, because it makes the user *not* want to click anything.

Images don't have to do "stuff" when mousing over - the mouse cursor changing to clickable state is the universal signal that makes people recognize that something is clickable.

Jonas Ronnegard

At least for me I hang around Artstation so much I feel more at home looking at artstation portfolios rather then personal one's, since every portfolio kinda works the same you can focus on looking at the art and don't have to figure out how people have set up their website.

slosh

You know what, I don't know how common this will be but I'm pretty sure my company blocked all your images.  I can load your site fine on my phone but when I tried to look at it at work, I don't see any thumbnails or any images.  Something to keep in mind.  And I work at a fairly large studio.

Quack!

I audibly groan every time I have to look at a portfolio that isn't ArtStation.

Slosh and EQ have proven with 2 responses why there are major pitfalls with personal website.

More often then not, a personal website actually looks poorly upon the artist with it, rather than positively.  No one will complain about an ArtStation folio.

With that said, if you are good/great at design, a well made website can show good design sense and technical skill when done well.
I still say, just use ArtStation.

shabba

I was going to default to ArtStation as its definitely the safest bet. But I opened ur personal site at home with no problems unlike some others here, (they make great points though as @Quack! mentioned. But I really liked ur personal site, very clean and easy to use. 

However, AS is safe to ensure you appease the widest audience of ppl looking through your work. Although I will say, I would much rather browse through https://www.artstation.com/artist/johnnrosh instead of http://https//johnnrosh.artstation.com/

I don't like the 'portfolio' page that AS has. Much prefer the normal AS page.

mazz423

Personally I prefer peoples dedicated portfolios, I find artstation in my experience can be pretty bloated and often means it takes me longer to load images on there at a lower resolution than on peoples personal sites.

The primary advantages of having your own site and using that are that it's your own space that you can control, I think your site is well put together although I'd second pior's points on the image darkening. Plus I personally think that having your own website is far more concrete than relying on another website to function as one. It's highly unlikely that artstation will go the way of cghub (or at least not under the same circumstances) but it's a worthwhile concern as that site going down resulted in many artists losing work and reference that they no longer had access to.

hmm_rock

I've found a good compromise is to have a direct link to artstation in your website menu bar, that way if someone wants to follow you or prefers that viewing method, they have the option up front. Personally I think your website is really nice and professional, then again as a non- web design person, the best I hope for is an inoffensive site. 

Jonas Ronnegard

Dudestein said:

http://yourcreativepush.com/2017/05/interview-with-shane-madden/

"The reality is, if you're just going to post your stuff on ArtStation and you give somebody a link and say 'hey, go check out my work on ArtStation!' what you're actually doing is sending them an open door to go look at everybody else's work."

I'm pretty sure they already know about artstation and have already been looking there anyway, but if you send them to your portfolio and not your community page then it would work exactly like any other portfolio anyway, more so if you add your custom domain as well.

slosh

Dudestein said:

http://yourcreativepush.com/2017/05/interview-with-shane-madden/

"The reality is, if you're just going to post your stuff on ArtStation and you give somebody a link and say 'hey, go check out my work on ArtStation!' what you're actually doing is sending them an open door to go look at everybody else's work."

Hmm, I'm not sure I agree with this.  If you're stuff is strong, its strong.  What I will say is just linking to your community artstation is not ideal.  I would build a proper website using their tools and use that as your link.  

Johnnynapalmsc

Thanks for the replies guys, and I am not sure why the images are blocked from my website? I will have to check on that. It's nice to see this discussion, super helpful at this point and time for me

PixelMasher

either or.....its the content of the portfolio that matters above all else. A slick site filled with mediocre art work isnt going to get anyone very far. same with artsation. Just get some amazing work infront of the right people.

one advantage you have with artstation is it's pretty much a social media platform, you can save/favorite images and quickly go back and find an artists work you like extremely fast rather than having to scratch your head and google "cool scifi hallway portfolio". good luck finding that artist's random website again if you lose the link. 

not only that, being a integrated art hub, you are going to get a ton more traffic to your work and random visitors, which means more eyeballs on your work, which means there is a lot higher chances of someone contacting you from finding you work and being impressed.

Either option is fine, but moving forward I am gonna stop wasting time building a personal site, and invest that in either personal work or optimizing my artsation/social media marketing.

plus if you accumulate a bunch of followers on artstation, and you decide to release a gumroad tutorial or something, thats a pre-existing audience or fanbase, all getting a notification to come buy your stuff. 

heartlessph1l

your website looks better.