Visual Playground – Day5
On the fifth day, Malika Favre reviewed our portfolios, with assistance from Hedof.
Photo credits: Cătălin Georgescu
As mentioned before, I was with a bunch of pretty awesome people, so the reviews were mainly about how to build your website to best emphasis your work. Since I figure they might be useful to others, here’s a list of my notes:
Multiples styles are ok, as long as you’re proficient in all of them. But you don’t need to prove you can do everything, so just put up what you do best/enjoy doing. Get a friend to look over your work from time tot time, in case you are emotionally attached to a project that no longer reflects your level/doesn’t fit in anymore.
Get rid of the clutter – meaning any features which might obscure the work (clickable hearts, in my case).
Use relevant details as thumbnails (and not necessary the whole work). Same goes for book-covers.
Act as a curator.
Use tags, and treat your website a bit like an image bank, in terms of ”searchability”.
Put the text at the bottom.
Put an e-mail, not a contact form, on your ”about page”.
Decide what you want from your website and be honest about it – meaning that you can have a punk/fine/underground-art portfolio if that represents you, and you can go wild with it. I think this is the first time I hear this in the context of portfolio reviews (previous ones tended to focus on ”how would an art-director view this”) – and I quite like the idea.
And so, progress was made :).