Thread: Online Portfolio

Hi everyone,

I have recently been building an online portfolio of my work and am looking to get a bit of feedback before it is finally finished and I start promoting myself a bit more. At the moment it is mainly football stuff (this is pretty much what I have been restricted to in my job) so apologies for that, but I am hoping to add more varied work in the not too distant future...

Matt Cole Graphic Design

Any feedback on the content, or the actual layout of the website itself will be gratefully received.

Many thanks

Matt

Hi Matt.

First off, I love the illustrations :)

The site is very clean and fresh, though I'd remove the 'under construction' banner at the bottom. These are pretty much defunct nowadays, since sites are now always under construction. Plus, there was nothing that made me think the site is under consruction aside from that banner. :)

As for the portfolio sections, why not have the thumbnails skip to the linked piece of work in the slideshow? Currently the images opening on top of the thumbnails feels a bit cluttered to me.

The site loaded very fast though which is a bonus. I normally just leave flash websites when they start to display a loading bar, but yours was very quick, and it was easy to navigate (again, something a lot of flash sites forget).

I'm not a fan of football but I really liked your designs. Did you do the illustrative elements too (like on the Spurs page)?

Just a quick one, I'll reply in detail later:

You design for Newcastle United sir. Winner.

Think the design of the site looks really nice - very clean, sophisticated and minimalist. The one thing I would change currently is that you have to wait for the flash bit to load, initially I was unsure where the links were and I think many others may not wait to see them eventually appear.

In terms of the work, it looks great. Football programmes are something I'd really love to get involved with and so I think it looks particularly impressive!

Originally Posted by dedwardp

Think the design of the site looks really nice - very clean, sophisticated and minimalist. The one thing I would change currently is that you have to wait for the flash bit to load, initially I was unsure where the links were and I think many others may not wait to see them eventually appear.

In terms of the work, it looks great. Football programmes are something I'd really love to get involved with and so I think it looks particularly impressive!

Excuse that comment - there is now a navigation bar on the left, brilliant, I love it!

Thanks for the feedback guys

Paul - Good shout on the under construction banner, I will look to remove that pretty soon. I also agree with you on the thumbnails/slideshow link, however the site is built through moonfruit (I'll probably get slated on here for that!) as I am not a web designer and so am stuck to the basic tools on there for now. I am hoping to start learning CCS and HTML stuff in the future...

With regards to the Spurs stuff, yes I did all the illustrative work on the player interview/feature pages. Quite lucky as they were pretty open minded and let me do what I wanted for those spreads. Some clubs can be quite rigid in terms of design and using corporate fonts/colours etc but Spurs & QPR were good to work for.

Sounds good, they definitely add a fresh feel to the pages :)

HTML and CSS are pretty easy to pick up once you start to understand them. Be sure to plan out the design on paper first (of course you will, you're a designer :P ) to see where you can reuse specific DIV id's to cut down on the amount of duplicate entries in your CSS file. Believe me, if you don't keep on top of them, you'll get frustrated having to alter multiple entries repeatedly later one!