Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Online Portfolio Help

I found this article in the archives of Publication Design. Since a lot of you mentioned in class that you will be working on resumes and web portfolios over break, I thought it would be helpful. Personally, I plan on putting in a lot of work on my site. I have been working on it slowly whenever I have time, but I'm still not very far. My biggest hurdles thus far have been program limitations (which I'm overcoming) and design indecision. I've had about two or three different layouts since I've started. It's either been too cute, too bland or too feminine. Since I am interested in men's magazine (such as Esquire) or another not-strictly-female magazine, I'm definitely trying to stay away from too cute. It's a hard thing to balance, though. I do want to make something that is represenititve of me and my personality ( which does include "girl" and "feminine"), but I also want to appeal to certain audiences.

Aesthetic issues aside, the article linked above helps a lot with the technical aspect of designing for web. For instance, taking into consideration the use of scroll bars. Something I've changed in my design is my vertical navigation bar. I had used large, round buttons that required the user to scroll to see them all because the initial window only showed about half of them. This was a problem because instantly half of the links to my work are hidden. Generally, users are unlikely to scroll very far down, so it is good to have the bulk of your information within the paramaters of the initial window.

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