Portfolio Redesign

Paul Scrivens’ recent posts on portfolio design (and their attendant comment thread) reminded me that I’d been meaning to update my portfolio since before Christmas. Today I got round to it.

I was impressed by Weightshift’s portfolio when I first saw it: big images, real colour and depth, unafraid to strut a little. My style is pretty different, but I think I took more than a little from them in terms of presentation. The new portfolio doesn’t mess about with tiny thumbnails, or even the usual selection of 50%-zoomed images of the site itself.

Instead there are some big closeups of interesting elements, less concerned with exposition than with giving a sense of the site. I think design is best appreciated live, so I just linked to the live sites; visitors can simply go over there and have a look if they want to see my work.

The old portfolio was pretty anaemic, with a number of problems. It was bitty and fragmented, and while the information was there, it had no impact. The thumbnail image, of the whole site, was tiny—less than 200 pixels wide. Clearly something had to be done, so earlier this year I started sketching out possible alternatives, while remaining within the bounds of a design I was, on the whole, pretty happy with.

(see different sizes at Flickr)

As you can see, I settled on #2, with text and a big image side-by-side. Naturally it changed in the execution: the image is on the right, not the left (because I wanted to remain consistent with the “body text on the left, additional content on the right” style present throughout the rest of the site), and I changed the kind of image from pictures of the entire site to close-ups. I still haven’t quite worked out the navigation for individual pages—that is, moving from one portfolio entry to the next—but since I’m happy with the rest of the design I think it’ll probably evolve quite naturally out of the existing layout.

If you look at the “Thoughts” title in the top right-hand side of the sketch, you’ll see that this post was already in my mind at the time. This is pretty classic—changes are made for a reason (or more usually, a host of them), and hopefully setting out what they were will give people some idea of the considerations involved in a process like this.

Given how I tend to witter on, option #1 was clearly inappropriate: de-emphasising the text, while perhaps what more graphics-oriented designers might do, just didn’t fit with my character and stylistic predilictions. Moreover, having it side-by-side with the image allows users to read the text, left to right, and when they reach the end of a line or a paragraph their eyes can just flick over to the image, letting the atmosphere of the site sink in.

The old design, for all its faults, presented all the information, above the fold. Header, body text, thumbnail, site info (who it was for, when it went live) and links to my other work were all present and correct. A big image and wider column of text means there’s simply less space for additional navigation. However, at the moment this isn’t a problem, if only because there are only two pieces in the portfolio.

That takes me to the next decision: restricting the portfolio to web design. Essentially, web design is all I really do right now. Graphics, Photoshop art and the like doesn’t really get a look-in, so I figured I might as well chuck those pieces and focus on what I was actually doing. As I say in the folio blurb, it’s “geared towards giving an overview of my current work.” Hopefully a couple of other sites will be going up in not too long, and I can add some more finished pieces.