You know... this might be the first site that's been posted on here that is, in actuality, too simple.
Visual design is all about refinement. When you're working on a minimalist design EVERY element has to be refined to the point of flawlessness. Because there are so few elements on a minimalist page, if any small facet of the page is unrefined or unpolished it stands out and the whole piece suffers.
Here you have what looks like a VERY antiquated design. I think the biggest problem is the lack of compelling typography. You've used a pretty standard font that everyone is familiar with, so it becomes even more challenging to let the typography 'speak', but it's certainly possible. I'd go through your site with a fine-toothed comb and make sure things are typographically sound. Some things to address:
- Line height is way too tight
- Spacing between headings and paragraphs is inconsistent and doesn't provide hierarchy
- When you want to keep things black and white you need vary things up with size or position or weight or style. Keeping everything relatively the same size, color and position allows things to blend together into a wall of "blah"
- You definitely need to space out the nav links a bit. Also, it's really hard to tell that's your navigation. Play around with the visual treatment a bit.
- Vary the letter spacing a bit. We use Helvetica/Arial all the time at work (almost exclusively, it's a brand font) so try applying -.025em of letter spacing to headings and -.01em of letter spacing to body copy... It really works wonders. Naturally, play around with values that look good to you, but that might help you with a starting point. I've found anything larger to be too tight.
Some other thoughts:
- Your site is 500px wide, which is a VERY old-fashioned dimension to work with. It does produce a nice meter to each line, but that doesn't make up for the inflexibility of the size. It's almost 2012, and I think it would be a shame not to take advantage of responsive web design here. With such a simple site you can really leverage scaling column / font sizes to cater to a wide array of devices and showcase a little of your coding chops.
- A portfolio site needs to instantly compel users. When a prospective employer/customer arrives on your site they want to be greeted by images of your work. I'd say that 90% (guessing, but still) of effective portfolio sites provide some sort of visually compelling imagery to captivate their users. The only way around this is to provide some stellar typography or some other element that can fill the void of imagery.
- Put some visual design love into your contact form. Browser-default form elements come across as amateurish and don't look consistently good across platforms. Especially those buttons... On any windows machine they will be gaudy and awful.
- In the copy on the portfolio section make sure to spell out what acronyms like "CMS" mean. Most clients won't understand what that is. You could consider using the <abbr> tag, too.
- If you did a website for someone provide pics or a link to it that's super obvious. I didn't realize that the title was a link.
- Also, make sure that all clickable elements are obviously different than the surrounding content and have good hover states. Changing the weight/color of links and putting an underline on hover are pretty typical ways to fix this.
All in all, it's a decent start, but without refinement one can't really pull off a minimalist design. Such simple sites require so much skill and attention to detail to pull off, so work at it. Let me know if you need clarification on anything.
Help
