Your portfolio repels jobs

    good article, thanks kleinluka.

    For me, i don't bother using flash for my website, I want to give visitors a quick and simple look at my work. From the few responses I got from companies I applied too, most said they wanted to see my texture maps as well, so they can see how I create the textures.

    I agree with the article, about showing thumbnails of a piece of your work is decieving. Seems like alot of artists do that, show a good part of their work which reveals the rest of the image.

    As I start working on my portfolio again, this article was very useful, thankyou for posting it. I'll show it to my students as well. hehe

    Nice article.

    Personally speaking, I fucking loathe Flash. It's primary purpose seems to be to hamper navigation and slow up the process of viewing the page. Generally speaking, if I'm on a website, I want some information. Anything that slows down the process of me obtaining that information irritates me. Flash has it's place and there's no doubt it can be useful, but mostly it's just abused.

    I work in IT procurement and if one of out suppliers switched to using Flash on their website I would dump them in a second, one of suppliers has their pages hosted inside a frame so the URL always stays the same. Huge pain in the arse. To give the direct link to a certain products page requires a whole lot more clicking than with our other suppliers who don't do anything that fancy, meaning you can just copy/paste the URL. Yes, it's a minor thing, but over time, it becomes very, very irritating indeed.

    The point is that a lot of this neat/flashly stuff that people do to make things look tidier is just hampering them, whenever you're dealing with things in high volume you're looking for convenience and usability. Those things ain't the same as something being pretty and neat.

    Very Nice Article, thanks for putting this up.

    The only one I have a problem with is this here:

    Quote

    Multiple layers - It's as if bad portfolios follow a common navigation pattern: Splash page -> News page -> Portfolio page -> 3D Art -> Characters -> Man with Axe thumbnail -> Man with Axe enlarged.

    Do you expect me not to hate clicking through seven pages just to see your art? Flatten your site. Put the art in my face and show me the quickest, simplest possible way of navigating. One page full of art is better than any of the multiple layers shown above.

    Seems to me, just plain laziness on the recruiter/employers end. The day I had to here someone hates to click there mouse more then once, just makes me feel, what is this world coming too But seriously, I under stand that a splash screen is useless, but what about the people who like to categorize their work. I use level design – games (catoregizing the mods, cs, stc game maps) map names - large thumbnails - enlarged screens. Note: all done with images and banners.

    Categorizing is fine, it's good, but not if there's 7 or 8 needless layers where 2 or 3 would have sufficed.

    In case of a lot of layers, I think showing a selection on an early layer is a good idea, so the impression comes quickly and if that interests an employer, he'll look further.

    As a general rule, the less clicking you have to do when reviewing portfolios the better. It might seem ridicolous to some of you but put yourself in a situation where you review lots of portfolios every day. You really learn to appreciate the ones with a straightforward and easily accessible design.

    The worst I've gotten so far was an email with a short typo-filled introduction, no specification of job title and 4 low compressed JPGs of untextured weapon models.

    Quote from kleinluka

    Here is a really nice one.http://retro-shinobi.com/

    I think you can find bad ones just about anywhere.

    That site is good?

    By reading that article, i think that portfolio site "broke" a few of the stuff he pointed out as bad things...

    Quote

    Forget splash pages and news pages or any other starting page that isn't putting art directly in my face.

    Quote

    [*] Vague thumbnails - A thumbnail exists to offer a relevant preview of a larger image. Yet I see thumbnails of random parts of a model that give me no indication of what I'm about to see. If I'm looking for medieval characters, how does a grainy thumbnail of the bottom of his foot help me find it?

    Quote

    [*] Multiple popups - A splash page shouldn't even exist, much less stay open when you click on it to enter the website. Neither should a thumbnail opening an image in a new window that I have to manually close.

    I think that covers it^^

    The artist was really awesome tho

    Not everything that is listed in that article applies by any means under any circumstances.

    What that site does do really nicely is give lots of information in a very easily reachable way. I select an artwork and it clearly gives me options to view different sort of renders, plus texture flats and normal maps, as well as video footage. There's nothing more I could ask for.

Participate now!

Don’t have an account yet? Register yourself now and be a part of our community!

Register Yourself Login