Portfolio feedback

Well I was horribly hungover on Sunday, so I figured why not do something productive while hiding away in my bedroom and update my never touched website It's fairly straightforward as I'm not much of a web designer, and any time I've tried something more complex (like my last design) I just end up abandoning it. Any feedback would be much appreciated. I know not all the sections have pics/descriptions up and some of the thumbnails don't link anywhere and look horrific quality; more looking for thoughts on the layout/design of the site. Is a single page a little TOO simple? Too many things listed? Too much text (where there is text)? Too many pictures per group?

http://www.reno-vation.net

Peris: Yeah, good call on the word doc resume; I'll look into making it an HTML/PDF choice instead. I hadn't uploaded it yet hence the lack of it's availability - needed a little reworking. I wanted the map descriptions to give at least a little insight into design choices/issues/challenges, but I guess that sort of thing is hard to condense into a short paragraph within the main page - better suited to seperate postmortem type affairs (or perhaps just interview questioning!). On the topic of what older work is best to miss out, I'm somewhat torn. I appreciate that the older tech stuff doesn't necessarily look too impressive these days, but at the same time having more work demonstrates a bit more versatility. I'm thinking of collapsing all the older HL1 engine stuff into that misc HL engine section (screenshots from the maps with seperate sections are already in there - just what I had to hand) and maybe picking the 9 best, most varied shots. Think that's a good idea? Or would you suggest losing it altogether?

Ferret: Ta dude, should the opportunity ever present itself I'd love it too!

Ok I've made an update to the site, changed a lot of pictures, cut down on the length of text sections, fixed up all the links, increased the heading font size, and tweaked the different sections. Some of the older/incompelte stuff I'm not sure I should really have on there but I'm not looking for a job right now so it's not really a big deal. I quite like having lots to look at rather than just a small handful of my best pieces. I'm open to people saying "take this picture and that shitty picture off!" though if you really think some brings things down. Thanks for the comments and suggestions so far, any more people might have are very welcome!

http://www.reno-vation.net

I've done a wee update to try a more subdued background - now a coffee colour that ought to be less abrasive than the orange. Does it work better? At first I liked it but now I'm feeling it's a bit...mleh Tried blue as well and it looks ok, but I don't think it was really much less abrasive than the orange I had originally. Also anchored the table to the top and bottom of the page, as having the gap at the top seemed kinda pointless and wasteful. Not sure if it comes out better or worse - not really a big issue I guess.

http://www.reno-vation.net

Thanks for the kind words everyone

Quote from hessi

just a small notice: downloading the resume as DOC file is not good. if you want it to be easy downloaded without loosing layout, then make it a pdf. open office is free and might export pdf's OR you make it a simple html page.work is of course nice, but the overall usability of your portfolio site isn't that good.

Yeah I'm planning on changing the resume to a popup HTML window, and from there offering a PDF download, but I've not gotten around to it yet. I'll grab open office and see if it will do the job, thanks for the pointer. Any others specifics on the usability issues?

Quote from Psycho

Awesome stuff but I would like to know how you got that flatshading effect.

I just created a set of flat colour textures, and used the position of the sun in my skybox to apply different shades to faces manually. I then entered all the textures into a .rad file so they would all become texture lights, and therefore all be rendered fullbright without the map itself being fullbright. Because there aren't ACTUALLY any lightmaps being rendered you can use a really high chop value without it having any effect on the visuals, so RAD doesn't need to take much time at all to compile.