Website please critique....

Sage

Hi, this is my current site which I will be updating shortly. I am wondering if there is anything in the 3D or 2D section worth keeping. Let me know what you think. Thanks.

Alex

www.apsentertainment.com

HellMark

Hey Alex,

Really liking the design for the temple and the overall feel of the sun shot in the 3D section. IMO it looks to be some of your best work. Some of the shots for Teridian Shadow are nice too. I particularly like the radio tower and the solar generator though I feel the brick on the generator isn't as strong as the texturing on the rest of it. Good designs and nice use of polys. It would be interesting to see you push those pieces and ideas farther with higer rez texture and bigger polycounts. Perhaps something to think about when updating or looking to add later on.

Mark "HellMark" Damico
3D Artist
www.markdamico.com

nealb4me

Hi,

I like the fact that it is easy to navigate and overall looks nice enough. However I don't really like the heavy compression of the images on the buttons and what not.

It would also be nice to see some higher res stuff, as was said, especially with the new consoles lurking around the corner.

Keep it up.

jzero

Looks great to me. However, I would change the section header from 'Conceptual Art' to 'Concept Art', since 'conceptual art' is what Christo does when he wraps landscapes. Just a nitpick, really.

/jzero

RazorBladder

Looks gud, I just feel the navigation graphics are somewhat too monochromatic by far, some more detail/colour variation certainly wouldn't go a miss.

notman

I'd like to offer up a warning about frames. I'm not sure if you've worked with them before, but they can be a real pain in the butt when you want to link someone to a page of your site. It's not a big deal, but if link someone to your 3d page, they won't get the nav menu. There are ways to get around it by checking for the previously visited site and if it isn't your domain, you redirect it to a corrected version of your site with the menu. It's a lot of work, but possible (I didn't check to see if you've implemented such code)

As far as the appearance though, it looks good and clean.

Sage

Heh, thanks for the response. I was sort of surprise though since everyone mostly liked what was there. The reason I used frames was to have everything load once or as few times as possible. The work I have now is much better, I guess I'll have to remove things a little at a time. The reason the assests for Teridian Shadow were so low was because the game was supposed to come out in 2001 to 2002 so the target system had alot less resources. What size should I make my site? Is 1024 x768 to small? Thanks.

Alex

Rick Stirling

Ditch frames - they are evil. Your reason about people not loading things many times? Well, browsers use a cache to store the graphics, so they are not downloaded multiple times.

I can make the sidebar frame scroll, that throws off the positioning of site design badly.

1024*768 is not too small. I usually work to 800x600, but it depends on who you are targeting the site towards.

As for the site itself, the images have bad compression, the mouseover looks like a photoshop filter, and the metal could do with being sharper.

moose

note on your links page: its good to promote your friends, but not in a way to turn eyes away from your site. Have the links open in a new window (target=blank) to make sure people eventually come back to your site.

im honestly not a fan of the design, it needs more color, the fonts aren't the same type face everywhere (links vs body text, resume page), the text on the about page juts out past the right margin (invisible line perpedicular to the end of the header bar).

Id scrap the description of the 2d work on the thumbnails page. If someone wants to know more about it, they'll be intrigued and click the link, then you can state your case. Either that, or come up with some formatting for them ie:

Title: 65 Hours
Medium: Photoshop
description here goes like this about things and stuff and the stuff that i was thinking about while creating this piece and this is what you should know about the story i am trying to tell

as for what to keep and what to scrap... honestly? scrap it all. Start fresh, its really nice to start new with new art and a new look. Just my personal opinion though