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Ah, Web and interactive portfolios, now this is more my cup of tea. When potential employers look at a Web portfolio, the site itself is just as important as the content. A good site says good things about the designer, a bad site makes people leave. Bad things include long load times, confusing navigation and music (with rare exception). It's also bad to make a site that looks like it belongs on Geocities in the mid 90's, but that should be a given. Having an organized and easy to navigate portfolio site is important because you won't be there to walk people through it. If you don't make it easy enough for people to find and look at your work, they probably won't.
There are also motion portfolios which are ideal for motion graphics. This isn't particularly appealing to me since I don't have very many animated pieces, but I did find it interesting when the author brings up animating still work to create a motion portfolio. I can see how this could cool to look at if done right, but I don't think it would work so well for stills of websites and such like I have.
And the section this week that really caught my eye this week: when is a website enough? This section of the book starts off saying that in some cases only a Web portfolio may be needed to find work and that this is "especially true for interactive designers." I'd like to think that's a good title for what the sort of thing I want to do, but it's already been decided that no, just a website isn't enough right now. Well, it was Monday when I was writing this, I have to have a proposal for a secondary portfolio for Thursday, and I'm still torn as to what format it should be, print or an interactive CD.
Designing a Digital Portfolio, Chapter 8
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Images placed in a digital portfolio will almost always need some sort of repurposing or optimizing. Repurposing can involve doing any number of things. If for example you have work that's printed on translucent paper, the effect won't show up when it's scanned. The transluceny can be simulated however by lowering the opacity of the digital image. Another type of repurposing involves the use of PDFs. They provide a way to recreate page layouts or group together multiple image files in one, clear and easy to view file. Well, it may not be clear and easy by default, but there are things you can do to make it easy. Avoid scrolling when viewed on screen and format the pages so that they can easily be printed. Use the original files for higher quality images and avoid using JPEGs until the end because they do not scale well. If there is more than one page, create a cover. The end result should be a single file and should be kept small, not necessarily because of download times, but because there are often size limitations on files sent through email. Also chose an appropriate file name so that your PDF will be easily identified by others.
Optimizing when done right can reduce file sizes and still leave you with a good looking image. When done wrong though you'll either have something that's big, ugly, or both. Depending on the format you chose, there are a number of different options to adjust when optimizing and it may take some work to find which settings work best for a particular image. Optimizing video is another story entirely. There are a number of different codecs that can be used, but you don't always know which ones will be installed on the viewer's computer. The best choice is to offer it in multiple formats, but recently, videos embedded in flash players seem to be a popular choice.
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Cameron Moll has some really nice CSS sites in his portfolio and his business card shown at the bottom of the page stood out to me because it's unique look.
I also went and saw the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie last week. It was one of my favorite shows growing up so I couldn't not go see it. Having taken classes doing some 3D stuff, I have more of an appreciation now for the amount of work it takes to make something like this. All right, I think I'm done being geeky for now.
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