Wednesday 27 January 2010

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”.

Wednesday 20 January 2010

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.