Sky Silcox - Level Designer

I know you probably don't want my opinion because we go to the same school... but it looks great man! Really impressed with a lot of the extra work you've done.

You seem to have the layout under control. I like the gameicons on the side of each link showing off what game the map is for. As your portfolio is clearly focused on the level design aspect, you do not need to have all content/screenshots available from the front page, which I would normally recommend to an environment artist.

One thing I did not like was that in your resume you have your individual projects listed as experience. While it technically is experience, it is not the type of experience you would expect to find listed in a resume I think. Your individual projects stand for themselves in the portfolio, so they don't really need to be listed here. I believe you run a risk of some people thinking that you are trying to "fool" them into thinking that you have more experience than you have, and that could potentially cost you job opportunities if the recruiter is petty. I don't know, maybe if you changed the heading to "Non professional experience" it might look better? Openness = ftw in these cases imo.

Also, since it's such a short text, I would consider moving the "about" section onto the resume page on the website. As both these links are basically clicked in order to find out about you, so it would be one click less.

I agree with Nurb on the unnecessary pages: I think the Resume, Contact and About pages could be merged into one. I would get rid of the contact form and place a link to your email address instead on top of the Resume (or maybe even on top of each page, like a @ symbol or something). I mean, I would think that HR people are forced to develop methods to manage their email contacts and all, and that they'd rather stick to it rather than sending a mail through a form.

About the portfolio itself: I think there's too much space between the top of the page and the actual first screenshots. You could scrap the page title line by adding a small indicator of which page is loaded in the menu. Also, since the shots are smaller than the website's width, they make the page look a bit unbalanced, especially with these category titles centered. I would either place the categories ("multiplayer levels") centered above the pics, or center the pics relatively to the page.

[Blocked Image: http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/5470/skyf.jpg]

All in all, you've got a very solid portfolio there. My only remark about the content would be that most of the levels sort of look too "Unreal"-ish, meaning they seem to all use a similar palette and post processing effects. Your team projects bring a bit of fresh air to the whole thing though. I also like how you detail your design goals and process for each project. Is there a precise reason why sometimes the Stats & Downloads sections are inverted?

I'd like to see more informative thumbnails on the front page rather than the letter box sized images you currently have.

Quote from Nurb

One thing I did not like was that in your resume you have your individual projects listed as experience. While it technically is experience, it is not the type of experience you would expect to find listed in a resume I think. Your individual projects stand for themselves in the portfolio, so they don't really need to be listed here. I believe you run a risk of some people thinking that you are trying to "fool" them into thinking that you have more experience than you have, and that could potentially cost you job opportunities if the recruiter is petty.

I've been meaning to ask about this with a few portfolios posted here. Is this actual coaching/direction from the Guild Hall curriculum to do this? Having gone through a lot of GH portfolios over the years, as well as having taken part a couple interviews with candidates, this has been a consistent negative point that stands out. What ends up happening is undue importance gets placed on things that aren't always that notable.

Your work appears pretty good, but your resume has some of this same "bloated" look of other GH resumes I've seen. The resume serves the purpose of a quick-glance reference of your entire experience. You'll be asked more detailed questions in your phone and on-site interviews. It is extremely rare that a single level is notable enough to deserve multiple bullet points in this context; your portfolio and your descriptions there handle this. A good rule of thumb has always been your resume should be a single page; I don't follow this exactly (my own is a little over a page), nor do I think you need to, but that might be a good comparison to keep in mind as you look things over.

What I would recommend is keeping your team projects separate as these do involve wider responsibilities. Then, I'd merge your single projects into at most single-sentence bullet points under a "Levels" entry, with the first bullet point being a one-to-two sentence overview of the category (for example - "Created a series of short-deadline levels in multiple engines as part of the Guild Hall design curriculum"). As you gain professional experience and more involved experience on larger commercial projects, you'll probably condense these much further.

That's a lot of rambling; I don't think your resume as it stands will actually hurt you, but I think a cleaner and simpler presentation can boost you a bit further as people are sorting through piles of resumes.

Well, I don't get a dishonest or misleading sense out of it, but I'd just be wary of it possibly causing confusion. Sounds like your own instincts are probably spot-on.

As for your sig, we use BBCode here instead of HTML. Try this:*

[url=http://www.linkedin.com/in/skysilcox]


[img=http://www.linkedin.com/img/webpromo/btn_profile_bluetxt_80x15.png]


[/url]

*I take no responsibility if this doesn't work properly

Really nice content, even though I'm not entirely convinced by the design of the page.

I would get rid of the bold letters and especially underlined ones, very small detail I know but I think it looks a bit meh and WIP-like.

If your using tables for the content, I'd recommend using another color for the BG rather than the same color of the BG of the page, that way it will separate your contents a lot better and you wont need to use those horizontal lines all over the place as separators.

Other than that, the content is really cool! keep up

Can only reiterate what others have said about your resume, it has no need to be that long and gives the impression you've done a lot more than you have. It could be easily condensed on to one page.

Very impressed. Love the HL2 advisor thing.

Huge improvement! The front page feels a little weird right now (a little off-balance with the smaller images on the left), but I'm sure you can sort that easily. The in-progress stuff and layout images are really great - it's not something I think anyone has to have on a portfolio, but in your case it definitely adds a lot.

Love the skin for the iPhone. Slight problem though. Any attempt to go to the homepage goes to the DM-ZharPlista.