Designer Portfolios Part 6
6th edition — by Patrick McNeil — Nov. 16, 2007
The Site Type
As does most of the time, this round of portfolio sites really blows me away. I am sadly left wishing my portfolio was so much sharper. Dang these designers for being so good! What really intrigues me about these portfolios is the lack of over the top, difficult to use interfaces. It seems the days of wrapping your beautiful work in a pain in the neck flash wrapper are over. Now, I am sure these still exist, and I would even say that the flash style portfolio still has it's place. It is really refreshing to see so many wonderful portfolios that make it easy to look at the artists work. After all, why make things more difficult then necessary when users already have such short attention spans! You don't want your users saying "you lost me at pre loader"
I just really love being able to skim through these artist works, the simplicity here is so refreshing. For example, take a gander at the portfolio of Santo Design
Santo Design
. There isn't even any fluff copy at the top, it goes straight into the portfolio. In fact, there is zero copy on the page. This is perhaps a bit dangerous, but the portfolio pieces are spectacular. So in this case why bother with the self inflating copy.
Another pattern you will see is collections of thumbnails. This isn't quite as overpowering as the larger images, but it still can have tremendous impact; especially if you have a rather large portfolio.
Sikker
is a nice example of this. And as expected, the thumbnails link to larger images loaded by some variation of a lightbox script. One great touch to this site is how the samples gray out when you mouse over them and only the current one is full color. This really helps the pieces to pop out as you browse them, making each thumbnail look that much more impressive.
So, overall the key point here is to leverage the impact of your works to make an impressive portfolio. But, that is by no means to imply that the wrapper is irrelevant. Clearly everyone of these samples put a major effort into ensuring the overall polish of the design.
Sample Usage
