Portfolio feedback please

strandroad

Please have a look at my portfolio and give your impressions - I'm job hunting and all comments are welcome especially re: possible commercial value!

Cheers!

pontovic

Very good!

strandroad

Cheers
Anyone else would like to pick it apart - please?.........

p

Overall you're work is pretty solid. A few things I'd look at.

• It's not very clear the way there's a 'newest' & 'work' section. When you click on 'work' you skip past the newest work.
• It's very jumpy clicking betwen 'work' 'about' and 'contact'. It's very disorientating and should be improved. I'd consider either making it a separate page, or if you want the single page site to add some smooth scrolling rather than a straight jump.
• The title of the site is confusing. 'mahagaine design' makes it sound like a design studio rather than a personal site. I think it's very important to decide what your site is for. A site/portfolio aimed at getting a job is very different from a site aimed at getting freelance work for example.
• A lot of your mockups have 'lorem ipsum' text. This is always a bad sign because it makes the site feel less real. Try to use real text and link to live sites where possible.
• Regarding your designs in general, they're pretty good. I'd work on your typography a little. I think make headings, subtitles, body text, dates etc... all flow well is a bit of a lost art but that attention to detail can really improve the quality & legibility of a site design. typesites.com is a good read.

On the technical side, you've got a few small valiation errors, i'd fix them:
http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mahagaine.com%2F%23about

Hope that helps.

strandroad

Thank you this is indeed very helpful & constructive!

The site is intended to be a simple showcase for people who get the details from me first - like employers or existing contacts - rather than a studio site (I'm not trying to attract external work atm) so I'll bear that in mind and make corrections to its flow as you suggested.

When you mention typography do you find something really jarring or is it more of a style/more oomph needed thing?

Thanks again

p

Cool, glad the feedback was useful. it's always hard to design for yourself.


Regarding the typography, I think your stuff could do with more attention to detail. I feel like you spend a lot of time on the colours, headers etc... but not enough on choosing the fonts to use. I know we're limited with what fonts we have on the web, but it's worth putting the extra effort in. It's something I need to do more myself, but you can always tell when someone makes that extra effort to get the line height right, or instead of choosing black, chose 90% grey instead. Little details. Also, I think another thing is that all your screenshots look like they've been taken with all anti-aliasing turned off which is pretty harsh on the eyes.

I've attached 2 crops from your sites. Looking at them on their own, I think if you were just given the task to redesign those little sections you'd make them better.

Just found these links in my bookmarks that might be useful too:
http://webtypography.net/
http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five_simple_steps_to_better_typography/
http://carsonified.com/blog/features/design/looking-at-type/
also, by the same author this is great:
http://www.markboulton.co.uk/articles/detail/five_simple_steps_to_designing_grid_systems/

Hope that helps!

Tim M-U

great website!, the websites in the portfolio are great! i see at the bottom, it says: marta/at/mahagaine/dot/com, shouldn't it say: (snip) (should fix that).

for the websites best viewing, have a slideshow, so you can view your websites professionally.

if its a self business, make the website into 3 pages, and for the protfolio slideshow on its own page. have the about part on the homepage, contact has it own.

hope this helps

Edit: Email address removed at mhge's request. Aidan.

S.M.B.

Nice work. The one page portfolio sites seem to be a popular choice at the moment.

I must throw up my own here to be reviewed soon as the feedback here is always very helpful.

strandroad

Much appreciated all, your feedback is priceless! Thank you!

p, you're absolutely right about typography plus you've pinpointed the exact moments where I got lazy and I knew it - lesson learnt! I'm mostly self-taught and I find that I can rely on my invention and taste for colour schemes and proportions but engaging & elegant typography requires a special precision of eye and I'm still working on this. I'll add your links to mine and hope something sinks in from regular visits. I wish there was a live course I could take. BTW I took the screenshots this way for this extra sharpness but maybe it's too much indeed.

Tim I put the address this way on purpose to mislead address harvesting robots - they can probably work it out anyway but some of them are only looking for "@" combinations. I will just put a form instead I guess.

aidan_walsh

We have a new Website Reviews forum so I'm going to bump this over there.