Standing Out From The Crowd

The current internet market is awash with new designers trying to break into the industry - for me as a new artist - I need to think about what is going to set me apart, what is unique about my online portfolio that sets me apart from everybody else?

A unique graphic or web design portfolio is the window to success!
In essence, you showcase your work in a unique way impressing the employer and cutting the competition with a sharp knife. A kickass graphic or web design portfolio is all about presentation – standing out of the crowd. The presentation of your work in an unusual way also enables the employer to see how creative you are because creativity is the essence of a graphic or web designer. 


The competition is tough...... You need some work!!!!
It is the foot in the door, or the foot booting you out. It is so important that you create a strong representation of your work. There is more than one way of presenting your work in this industry
It doesn’t matter if you are a beginner and you don’t have much work to flaunt. Create a few compelling designs for yourself. Create at least 7 to 8 compelling designs in a genre that suits the job description. For example, if you are applying as a logo designer, create 7 to 8 compelling logos of famous brands using your imagination. Be creative!!!!


Presenting your work.... Think about it first...
Make your best work visible from the start. If you are an illustrator, have your best piece clearly visible or at least easily accessible from the homepage.

Think about a unique presentation. You can print all your designs and put it in a folder to present, but they would be a common way to present. So think of something different.
Normally, there are 3 main ways to create graphic or web design portfolios: Print it out, create a website and put your portfolio online and create a DVD or CD of your work. To create the maximum impact, go for all three of them. But do it in a unique way. Consider the following tactic to create a kickass graphic or web design portfolio:

1. For each design, write a brief description telling about the design and how you were inspired to create it. Give a brief background.
2. Create a Headline for each design in the portfolio. The headline should be compelling. Provide details of the design like which software you used to create it and where it is been used.
3. Create a table of contents especially when you are putting it online or on CD/DVD. The table of contents should be in a logical order – date/year wise or design wise
4. For the online version, create a compelling webpage and use flash to showcase your work in a timeline or use thumbnails on the page with brief description. Be creative with the webpage hosting your portfolio. Use white and blue colors and a creative use of a brush and/or pencil on the page. Using flash will surely enhance the page design.

A note on flash - although I understand that by using flash you can make your online portfolio more 'unique" I would argue that unless your work is animation or motion picture there is not always a need for it, in reality a print or illustration artist should allow their work to do all the speaking, not a fancy slideshow.  Also Flash is not enabled on a large number of computers one in example is the iPad and we all know how popular that has become.  Imagine a potential client attempting to check out your website, only to be faced with the task of downloading Flash before he can view it.


How about making a site mobile phone compatible???

Viewing portfolios from a phone like an iPhone is becoming more and more prevalent. Companies quite often use the iPhone as a platform to view work on, and may skip over portfolios that don’t ride well in mobile format. 
One view on this "I’ve seen that generally they work better with blog-like layouts because thumbnails might end up being too small on the iPhone’s screen. I don’t have much experience with other mobile platforms, but most art directors I know have an iPhone
Creating an iPhone version of the site would enable you to stand out from the crowd, not everybody will have one and therefore more companies would see your site.  If your site has lots of thumbnails you could consider organising them in a list format so they are viewable on a mobile phone.

Making it work

In order to move my online portfolio from my head and into reality there are various things I need to consider :


Type of Font :
In order to make my website readable across all audiences, I need to consider the type of fonts that I use, there are certain fonts that are "web safe" and can be viewed across a range of platforms :

Arial - A sans serif typeface designed by Monotype as a cheaper substitute for Helvetica packaged with Microsoft Windows, other Microsoft software.

Verdana - Verdana is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft Corporation with a purpose of being readable at small sizes on a screen.

Times New Roman - Times New Roman is a serif typeface commissioned by the British newspaper, The Times, in 1931. Since then it was the default type-face used in Microsoft Office Word (till Office XP)

Georgia - Bears lots of similarities with Times New Roman, but substantially larger.

Lucida Console - Lucida is an extended family of related typefaces. Lucida Grande is the font that’s used throughout Mac OS, whereas Lucida Sans Unicode is a similar Windows font. Both fonts belong to the “humanist” sans-serif type which is the most calligraphic of all typefaces in the sans-serif family.

Courier New -  Courier is a monospaced slab serif typeface designed to resemble the output from a strike-on typewriter.

Tahoma - Similar to Verdana, Tahoma has a narrower body, less generous counters, tighter letter spacing, and a more complete unicode character set. Tahoma was designed as a bitmap rather than an outline font.

Century Gothic - Century Gothic is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed for Monotype Imaging. The Century Gothic face is distinct for its single-story lowercase a and g. 

Here is a survey conducted by Codestyle showing some of the most popular fonts used on websites :

 

Colours : 

The importance in choosing the right colours for your website should not be underestimated.  It is agreed that colours have a great influence on the human mind, the scheme that you use on a website can either entice a visitor to stop and look or make them leave straight away.

Here are some tips on making the colour scheme of a website more appealing:

Use a natural palette of colours – They are more pleasing that there artificial counterparts.  Unnatural colours for example bright green or red can cause eye fatigue and chase visitors away.

Create a strong contrast between a page’s background and its text – The best combination for readability is black text on white background.  Other effective web site background colours include dark blue, gray and black.

Select an average of three different colours and use them consistently throughout your website – Colour harmony is one of the most important things to consider when creating a pleasant viewing experience. Use 4 or 5 colours at the most – more will create inconsistency and even possible eye sore for the viewer.

Other things that I would need to consider when deciding on a colour scheme are age and gender - People of different ages have different reactions to colours. People past a certain age will find web sites with more sober and restrained (and therefore relaxing to the eye) colours more attractive. Youngsters, on the other hand, will appreciate more vivid and brighter colours. Make the distinction between mature and young audience by using the appropriate colours for each category.

People also have preferences according to their gender. Men tend to prefer blue and orange to red and yellow, while women prefer red to blue and yellow to orange. Also remember when you are addressing to women that they don’t all like pink. 

When creating a colour scheme it is important to get the right HTML codes, one really useful website that I will use to help me do this is : http://colorschemedesigner.com

Screen Resolution :
The different screen resolutions used on different computers is a constant problem for web designers.  When creating a website you need to ensure that it looks ok on all resolutions.
The most common screen size is 1024x768, currently 60% of monitors are set at this size, this can be compared to only 17% that are set at 800x600 - obviously this suggests that you need to focus on the 60% and make it work "best at this size" but you cannot simply ignore the other 17%.  Therefore the best layout would be a fluid or a liquid layout.

When determining the optimum page layout for a specific screen size there are three main things to consider 
1) Initial visibility - Can all the users see all the info without scrolling - there are arguments for and against whether this is important, some say yes its very important and that users don't like to scroll, others for example Milissa Tarquini in her article Blasting the myth of the fold argue that we should "stop worrying about the fold, stop cramming stuff above a certain pixel point. You’re not helping anyone. Open up your designs and give your users some visual breathing room. If your content is compelling enough your users will read it to the end"
2) Readability - How easy is it to read the text in various columns etc
3) Aesthetics - How does your screen actually look - does it look good at the correct resolution, do all the pictures, text etc line up correctly are things situated in the correct place e.g. text next to the correct image.
One important thing to note relating back to the previous post - screen's do not automatically scale down to the size of a mobile phone screen.  Mobile environments are special, and therefore you must design a separate platform to account for this.


Importance of a domain name : 

Your domain name

 | by David Callan

Your domain name is imperative to the success of your website, if anyone tells you otherwise they're either lying or don't know what they're talking about.
You need a domain name if you're serious about being an online entity, it's where you'll direct all your potential customers to. For them to become customers you've to make a good first impression and having your own domain name rather than some free geocities address that's long and cumbersome will enable you to do this.
There are lots of other benefits of having your own domain, here's just a few of them.

A domain name is your own unique identity and always will be as long has you continue to use that name. Say for instance you hosted your free site with geocities and you found that you needed a more advanced host because your website was becoming successful. Visitors and links to your site would know you by the long geocities URL and you'd have to start promoting your new URL all over again. If you had your own domain name you could change hosts as often as you like and people would still be able to find you simply by typing in your domain name.
You can promote your website instead of someone else's when you're sending emails as your domain name will be in the email address, for example admin@akamarketing.com is helping to promote akamarketing.com while akamarketing@aol.com is helping to promote and brand AOL.com
Your likely to have more traffic to your website with your own domain name because more people will be returning as they can remember your address and because many search directories such as Yahoo only index websites with their own domain name.

Domain names are so cheap nowadays that there's no excuse for not having one. Now that your ready to get yourself a domain name here's some pointers to help you choose a good one.

Size does matter

In the case of domain names the smaller the better. Of course short domain names are harder to find but if you can find one it has a number of advantages such as, it's easier to brand, easier to remember and it's harder to misspell.

Easy to remember

Try to get a name that's easy to remember and sounds good. General words are best for this but since these are all gone at this stage you should look for non general names or combinations of general names which rhyme and sound good together. Take elephantdroppings.com for example that's an easy to remember name.

Relate to your business

If you use keywords which are related to your business industry you will help your search engine rankings. What's even better is if you can get your actual business name or a name similar to your company name as your domain name, this way all your off-line branding will pay off online as Internet users should be able to guess your domain name from your business name.

Avoid similarities

This means you should avoid choosing domain names that already have similar counterparts online, if you choose one of these people could end up on your competitors site rather than yours because they got confused over the two domain names.

.com is best

You should always aim for the .com version of a name, that's what most people will go to after doing a search or after typing something directly into their address bar, if you register .tv or .net or any of the other available extensions and your competition has the .com version then you've just lost a potential customer.