Storming, Norming and Forming

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been finding my feet as the project manager for ‘Team HNC’. It’s been a laborious and sometimes downright dull predicament I find myself in. Working through the endless amount of admin, setting up projects with online project management software, making Gantt charts and production schedules is all quite alien to me.

The hardest part I have found about it all though is delegating work. I dreamt of an ideal scenario at the start, in which we all shared tasks, a foolish notion. I now realise to be an efficient well oiled team I need to delegate, something I find hard, given I’m not particularly used to a position of power.

Working as a team can create some pressure within the group and my stance is usually quite diplomatic and democratic. I started to see minor diasagreements at the begining appear with my leadership. This is understandable due to the stress we have been under. Now we are all taking things a little less seriously the pressure is off and the team is running harmoniously.

I must now convey that I make the final decision if we run into any disagreements. This is a hard thing to implement when you are a close knit team; we all get on well and would regard each other as friends. On the all I'm extremely pleased with the team, we are now ready for client scoping and hope to have all team tasks out of the way very soon.

The team aspect puts me and my team in a position of trust. At the start I found it hard sometimes to sit back and let other people do the work, without trying to implement my own stamp of approval on it. I've now learnt to trust my team fully and feel much more relaxed when delegating tasks.

Mash up of a web proffesionals portfolio!

My competitive analysis of a web professional’s online portfolio will be on Digital Mash, the portfolio of Australian based designer Rob Morris.

The site has a clean uncluttered feel, without feeling boring, it still manages to capture some of this designer’s flair. This is evident with the eye catching opening graphic, us of bold contrasting colours, warm and cool, dark and light.

The cool grey works effectively with the striking red/pink, with the use of bold headings and titles.

The site has a no-fuss means of navigation with easy to identify headers. The recent work section simply reveals one long page of artwork with no fancy use of flash animation or technical wizardry.

This simple straight forward approach makes the sites work stand up for it, but may fail to make the site truly rememberable on its own merits.

The site does try and capture the designers own personality with a blog and options to follow him through social networking. There is a client login area and a contact page to drum up new work, this site seems to have all the bases covered.

A great site that manages to showcase and advertise a competent designer well, the only thing it may be lacking is that decisive “wow factor”.

Competitive Analysis: Student Portfolio

www.jsartain.com is the online portfolio of Jeff Sartain, a recently graduated web designer from San Diego Platt College.

The site immediately catches your eye with its outlandish and to be honest quite garish use of colours. Bright orange and green are used to in my opinion display some sort of the wackiness and individuality of the designer. You can see further examples of this over the top approach with the choice of font for headings.

The hyperlinks used on the orange background are nearly unreadable, with little or no contrast on screen. The sight does take on a better appearance once you explore the other sections of the site, which are easily found thanks to the use of a good navigation header.

In the work samples section the orange and green is kept to a minimum, with a much more constrained approach letting his work stand out more. These pages also show good repetition and some good contrast with the white text on the dark grey background.

The font size of body text however is very small and some readers will find it difficult to read. This is in contrast to some of the body text on other pages however where it appears overly big, child like almost. This bad use of repitition and failing to create a constant theme with a clear market audience is perhaps the biggest failing of this site.

Overall the site tries to use repetition to good effect in terms of its colour selection, but it fails with fonts and font sizes. It choice of discordant colours is a poor choice as the site fails to showcase the work properly and all you wish to do get off the site as quickly as possible.