Any criticism on my portfolio design would be appreciated.

 

http://i.imgur.com/HkXKJ.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/3Ufr9.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/iyJPa.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/EiRBR.jpg

 

The face in the corner is just a placeholder for a 3D, animated face of myself, but the colours should be somewhat similar to the final thing.

 

There's four pages, a contact page, still art, animation and design. When you click a navigation button it sort of swipes itself over the bottom layer which holds the content of the current page. When it's swiped over completely, then the content is loaded into the bottom layer and the top layer disappears.

 

My main thoughts about it were to keep it simple, clean, easy to navigate, and to look really cool. I tried experimenting a bit with golden spirals and ratios, don't know if that's apparent, and a minimal palette.

Edited August 7, 201214 yr by megaspel

Good job I appreciate it as well

Thanks, but that's not at all helpful.

I think you need to take a step back and think about what people need to get from your site. It seems as though you have designed this rather statically with little thought as to how someone would use it. If you mainly do art and illustration then I guess I can see why because you're so used to creating something for a static medium.

 

I'd recommend having a look through some web design inspiration galleries for sites with similar themes to yours. It's not too hard to create a really fun and exciting illustration based site but you need to be able to balance the artistic side with the usability.

 

As an example, here are some screenshots of a site I built (using Flash. Don't do that. It was a uni project) that gives quite a good example of how a site can have the graphic illustrations on show whilst keeping itself easily useable.

 

Homepage

Gallery Page

Info page

 

The whole thing had a pop-out navigation, obviously not something you want to do, so don't worry about that, but you can see how the images can be placed on a still fairly useable site.

Cheers for the help! I too, know all too well, the horrors of a Flash website. My old portfolio is at http://melior.bioviral.net which I made when I was about 16. Every time I give the link out, I feel a little bit guilty for subjecting them to my website.

 

I tried playing around with the design a bit, trying to focus more on my artistic stuffs. Even though I said that, don't focus on the art stuff here, it's just a placeholder for a HTML video.

 

http://i.imgur.com/y4UKy.jpg