James Lea - Level Design

    I recently taught myself HTML/CSS so I could make a portfolio. It needs some tweaking, and I might disable the 'OTHER' page until I have time to formatit more properly, but here it is:

    http://www.happy-hills.net

    I followed a guide on gamasutra for what to include on my resume and it seems a bit information overload so I should probably clean that up alot.

    In terms of design I'd say this:


    • [*:4itgorh5] The header fonts are horrible. Are they Times New Roman? They don't look very professional.
      [*:4itgorh5] The site is quite wide and doesn't scale when the browser width is reduced. I'm viewing it on my laptop which has a 1366 x 768 resolution and the page takes up about 90% of the width of my screen. I think that reducing the width of the main div to around 800px would be much better. It would also help to make your text easier to digest.
      [*:4itgorh5] The download indent effect looks unprofessional.
      [*:4itgorh5] Why is the blog link in the top-right corner? And why is it not in the same style as the other links on the page? I didn't notice it was there until a few minutes after browsing around.

    I will fix up and shorten all the text asap, unfortunately everything I write turns out verbose. Thanks for pointing out the header font I overlooked that. I will find a better way to do the download links. They have the tab effect to maintain consistency with the plaintext resume and contact card download buttons since I need to signify those two are downloads but don't want to use the word download...

    As for the width, yes it's wide but is that a bad thing? Accepted webdesign practices say yes... BUT it's a portfolio and not intended for daily browsing, or to be occasionally glanced at while doing other things, it's only purpose is to display images for critical examination. I built everything around the images. Maybe I could make them smaller but since no one browsing a portfolio clicks on more than a couple images I feel it's important to have all images for a project on the screen at one time at a "readable" resolution. Also you can clearly see everything in every image of every level (or scene) without ever clicking, loading, or navigating back and forth.

    But then again I'm very new to webdesign and maybe just wrong so I am opening dreamweaver and photoshop right now to make it a bit smaller (and probably a bit more after that and so on....)

    Here's some stuff I think :

    -The two TF2 levels are really cool!

    -Scenes. I don't know what they really bring to the portfolio. They are also relatively old. I think you should concentrate on the latest and greatest content (if you are looking for a job, mind you! If this is just a showcase portfolio then by all means keep them up!)

    -Other. Skip the HUD art stuff, focus more on your modeling I would say. If you lack content, why not give a closer look of the props you made for the space-themed TF2 map?

    And in the CV/resume section, I'd skip the ultra-specific Source stuff, like Faceposer, soundscapes, actbusy and all that. I don't think it's very relevant info to companies outside of Valve, and it just bloats the page.

    Okay so that's what I think anyway!

    did you increase the contrast of the screenshots? looks awfully contrasty to me tbh. also: i hate the banner and buttons, imo they dont fit in with the rest of the (tight) design. content looks good tho!

    Page looks very oldschool-ish, but I like that you put big screenshots on the main page. I've placed your portfolio on LD.org in "portfolio sites" BTW

    Big update over the past week, added my map wavelet to the top, added video flythroughs for the tf2 maps, added overview image for desolation, cleaned up the on-site resume/cv, cleaned up alot of the code so it is simpler and uses SSI for common page elements, changed the header up so that the words in the banner are now the links to different pages, implemented highslide, implemented google analytics, implemented a 3rd party file tracking script for analytics.

    But the core site design has not changed.

    Go ahead and click on things and download the map files so I can see if the download tracking script is working right

    Also one of my hard drives died ( ) which means that tf2 is now working ( ) so I can get back to working on frostline..expect to see her get posted soon.

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