Your portfolio repels jobs

[Defrag]

I have to agree on the "Flashy" sites made by artists. I've had to go through a lot of portfolio sites to find people for our mod, and some of the sites were so badly made by people trying to appear unique / as if they think outside the box that I just gave up and closed the site. Primary hate is sites that have images with parts you click, but it's not clear which parts are clickable, or what they represent. I even had one site where there were random characters all over the place, and you clicked a character that took you to a link, but it didn't tell you what the link was. I wanted to punch the idiot that made the site. I also agree about the image branding stuff. People never put pertinent information in a filename when they submit them, and the images are rarely branded either. I just handle recruitment for a mod and I get maddened by it, so professional recruiters are probably 100x more irritable.

[⌐■_■]

Does anyone have a usable htm/html-template I could use?

[Zacker]

Thanks for pointing out this article! It was good reading for sure, I learned a lot.

[st0lve]

When I'm old enough to actually think about a job, I'll put all that into mind.

Great article.

[alexroyce]

Good article. I really need to get a proper website up so i can host my work :/

[Hourences]

Game site often use flash stuff too, driving me completely nuts half the time. I just want to see screenshots of the damn game and not 3000 hours of animated intro, loud music or other such crap to then finally be pressented with 400x300 res screenshots..Portfolio sites often do the same kind of thing and thats real bad yeah. But if they manage to do it properly it might be cool, or the artist could make 2 versions, the flash one and a simple version..

Rest of article was pretty good but I dont agree with having your entire portfolio on 1 page with just tumbs, often its just too much work or info to post on 1 single page. Doesnt help the readers focus and itll load slow too prolly

And I often like a lot of info or news pages or stuff because it shows how active or involved the person is and if I have more info I know better with who Im dealing and who he is and what exactly hes doing so I dont have to go ask 300 questions in the interview or email conversation. If it appears the guy doesnt want to relocate for example Id like to know such info as soon as possible

[Lee3dee]

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

[Schmung]

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.

[Grinwhrl]

Very Nice Article, thanks for putting this up.

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

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.

[Captain P]

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.

[kleinluka]

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.

[General Vivi]

that was cool i like it

[Bic-B@ll]

klein do you have any examples of good/bad portfolios?

[kleinluka]

Here is a really nice one.

http://retro-shinobi.com/

I think you can find bad ones just about anywhere.

[Bic-B@ll]

arr, ferret's is rather bad