Greg McLean
Design Experience
Personal Portfolio Website
This website was fun to design and execute. As in the past, my sketches and design ideas outstripped my ability to execute them. This time, instead of re-designing, I pressed on and used my skills with Photoshop and Illustrator to achieve my vision. I had to abandon some complexities, but it was an excellent learning experience. Once I looked at the potential of the div tags with contained graphics, I began to be able to bring my design to fruition.
I used the various types of art to define the organization of the site making it purely a portfolio site. I chose bright color schemes to identify each portion of my site: red for home, cyan for audio art, green for video art, blue for still images and graphics, and yellow for my written art. Each category of art has several examples with links to my ‘band’ website www.sinningofthebeginning.com , youtube.com, or embedded files like .pdfs. For my written art, I chose to embed it as text.
Unfortunately, I was not able to embed the audio and video directly in to my site making it necessary to link outside of this project. To make the transition to youtube.com smoother, I created separate pages for each video. My audio art and image art link out directly to sinningofthebeginning.com. Another unfortunate issue I could not resolve, is my site being anchored to the top-left corner of the browser window. Despite many attempts and much research, I cannot get it to center.
The biggest challenge I encountered was the amount of Photoshop work I had to do in order to achieve a unified color scheme for each category of art. This skewed my time management and put me behind. In the future, I will look at using some of Photoshop’s batch processing abilities. I am very pleased with the look and am excited to tighten up the whole site and make it a thorough example of my work. Another challenge was getting the links to encompass an entire div tag. After much frustration, I found the right way to code it, but never figured out the hover, active, and link attributes. To work around that, I used an image on pages where the links are active giving a similar look and unified feel.
The site is unified in look and laid out in an asymmetrical way that allows plenty of room for my portfolio to grow. The energetic colors and glowing text emphasize the concept of ‘radiation therapy’, which is an art project I have been collaborating with my brother on for over 6 years. As this portfolio site develops, it will tie in nicely with the vibe from these long projects. The logo is borrowed from this project, but it is my own work. I did have to resize it and get all the color changes I wanted in order to have the look I sought with this website. In the future, I will probably add a couple more design elements to add more symmetry, but I don’t want it to be crowded. I also may decide to use larger thumbnails as the links depending on how many examples I want to have on this site.
