Personal Website Redesgin

Jamie Mitchell

Junior Member
Hey all,
I'm about to graduate from uni so I've been playing with my site, moving from the safety of minimalism to a slightly more complex illustrative style.

I want to hit the ground running with a nice design so feel free to rip it to shreds, no pandering ;)
WEBSITE

I've put a little work on there to set the scene, but the things I'm most interested in working on are the background, use of colour and perhaps navigation. If you see something else painful please let me know.
Thanks guys
J
 
Hi Jamie, its really nice site and your work is great. the navigation was little tricky at first and it may confuse the layman but other than that it's a really cool site.
 
Cheers for the feedback.
I was thinking that the 'all work play' thing isn't a vital phrase for SEO so I might do some cool typographic designs to make them stand out as the navigation links. (maybe with an & between 'work' and 'play' too). What do you reckon?

Playing with the background at the moment, I'll update and get a fresh link posted soon
 
Oh I checked out your website and the background is behaving strangely (looks unintentional). I think you need to change the 'background-scroll' parameter to 'scroll' rather than 'fixed'...not sure.
 
No wait, the background-scroll value is right, the image you've used just needs to be bigger to accommodate for larger resolution screens.
 
I'm not sure how I feel about the disconnect from section to section. Especially your work. Right now I'm on a giant monitor (27inch iMac) and your work is displaying about half way down my window. I can only imagine that on a typical laptop (13-15inch) your work would display below the pages fold.
To me it would make more sense to have the content display directly to the right of your left hand bar. I would probably axe / re-think the work and play nav as well.
Was this based off of a template, or is this an original design?
 
It's an original design. I am terrible at web design, just thought I owed it to myself as a designer to give it a bash.

On my monitor (15in 1080x1920) the navigation is positioned to the right of the left-hand sidebar, so I think I may have messed up the coding.
Do you mean to get rid of 'work/play' entirely or just rethink the layout of the nav? (as I am planning on doing the latter when I get some time in the next few days).

Anyway thanks for the heads-up on the bug, that's pretty major. If you could send me a screenshot it would be massive help, don't worry if it's too much hassle.

Peace

J
 
That work/play element is a good idea, but it sort of feels like we've skipped a directory. There's no introduction or explanation to it, it's just "WORK" "PLAY"
I think you've got something good, but there are quite a few inconsistencies which need to be addressed before it can be anything close to great.
 
Hey Jamie,
I attached a screen shot of the website. Having the nav cascade down / hang out on the right hand side of your nav, and then have your work start towards the bottom of the page forces the reader to have to scroll to view your work (which for a potential employer, is a big no-no)
You want your work to be up-front and in the views face from the get-go, since it is in fact your biggest asset.
I would move your logo up, and move the work / play options below it. Your sub-nav should be hidden so it only displays on activation (when you activate work / play)
This will keep your nav intuitive and move your work up the page.
Lastly, I'm not sure how I feel about the thin rectangles as a way to display your work. I understand you're doing it to be different, but I think your work can be highlighted better then that.
 
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