Portfolio flair
I did a lot of research when deciding how to set up my online portfolio (I still follow the basic design principles I learned in school – step 1: research). I looked at a whole lot of designers’ portfolios, most of them had some really great work in them, but I wasn’t always wild about their general set up. This article – My Last Portfolio Sucked, Yours Might, Too – generally backs up a lot of what I was feeling.
I knew I didn’t like incomprehensible thumbnails that are so tiny or such a small part of the image that you can’t tell what you’re looking at. Some sites using them did look really cool overall, but no one will want to have to spend a lot of time clicking through the images. I only hit one or two sites that had music, but I don’t remember anything else about them, I left those sites immediately. Seriously, people, no one likes sites that play music! Stop it with the music already!
The sites I did like generally had a layout that allowed you to see the projects without having to click or scroll too much. So that’s what I went with in the end – there’s just a few general categories, each category has blog-style layout with a brief description and image, and each image can be clicked so you can see a larger image. It’s similar to how you’d mount pieces on a plain, black background in a physical portfolio, a purposeful reduction of surrounding distraction.
It would have been easy to go with a template with a lot of flair that would have required a lot of clicking, and it would have looked great. I made a conscious choice to not do that. I don’t like having to navigate that way myself, and I didn’t want the distraction from my actual work samples. But, I do wonder if I made the right decision there. What if a hiring manager sees so many portfolios with lots of bells and whistles that mine seems boring by comparison? What if they assume that I’m incapable of that level of work?
It occurs to me that maybe those other designers have 15 pieces of flair for a reason. Maybe that’s what it takes to get the necessary attention.
I know nothing about portfolios or design, but I HATE cluttered websites where there are ten thousand things clamoring for the reader’s attention. I use AdBlock to screen out as much of the junk as I can. But then, I am not a terribly visually-inspired person; I want the words, and I want them where I can easily read them, and I want the page to load quickly and not have to get hung up while 37 different ads wait for their servers to get completely loaded. So, I very much prefer this style – smooth, sleek, focused – to the “bells and whistles” stuff. For what that’s worth.