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This chapter is all about interface design, something I've been interested in for a while now. It's really easy to make an interface that's pretty awful, just ask anyone in computer science (I jest only because I love…and since it's my minor). Interface design for a portfolio is as the author says only a "subset of interface design" and the process for designing it can be broken up into four main stages:
Group
What is the best way to group your work for display on your site? Provided in the book is a list of some possible groupings. Two of the possibilities are by technology (print, interactive, etc.) or by medium (2D, 3D, etc.). But I'm using interactive and 3D! So maybe my groups don't all fit into the same nice little category, but it doesn't matter. What I've chosen is still logical, organized, and is what I think best fits my collection of work.
Map
Site map - organize all of your pages, show he connections between pages, and so on and so forth. Not a particularly interesting thing to discuss, but they're helpful to do.
Schematic
This is where you figure out how big your page should be, how your pages will be laid out, what links you'll have, and then how those links will be organized. Also note that if you come up with the bright idea (like I had) of trying to center a site both vertically and horizontally using just CSS, that it will be a pain to make work. I think maybe I got though.
Look and Feel
What kind of style and theme will the site have, how big will the different elements on the page be? As a general rule it's best for the design a portfolio site to not distract the viewer from the content (unless of course you go all out and make a totally awesome site). As for the size of things on the page, anything that's super giant will probably look stupid. For my site I'm sticking with a simple, minimalistic design with an unobtrusive set of navigations links at the top of the page.
There's also a page about type, and what you should and shouldn't do with it on your portfolio site. My favorite is number eight on the list: Avoid Times New Roman. When I see Times used on websites, it makes me cry inside. The only thing worse is Comic Sans.
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Let's see, for a link this week how about this one. An interesting article I saw about freelance clients and as a bonus there are cartoons of sock puppet looking things.
I hope this post came out OK, I can't help but get the feeling that's there's some big glaring error in it somewhere that I just can't find. See, this is how I've felt all week
I think my portfolio may be conspiring with the alternative interfaces site and with my AI project to do me in.
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