Hey, I just completed the first iteration of my online portfolio. I’m a junior in college looking for an internship this summer, and this webpage is designed to get me said internship. How well do you think it fulfills its mission?
i really like your work. especially the hardware cooling…i love that you built it and ran your system! the sandals are beautiful.
I was reading your questions about sketching in another post…and they definately need some improvement. The simple pen sketches are kind of working. You need to clean them up. They should be deliberate and to the point. Yours look a little like a confused 10 year old made them. Also your perspective is WAAAAAAY off. That is a killer to most sketches. Its hard to tell from just one jpeg of sketches but it seems like a simple pen style would work for you. just get your perspective right and work on cleaning up your lines. I would lose the colored pencil also. If you want value throw in some marker. or photoshop.
good call- in the interest of netting an internship this summer, I’m going to post my sketches only after i’ve practiced. Nearly everyone I’ve spoken to has said that sketching is way more of a skill than a talent, meaning that practice is the best way to improve. I’m going to spend at least an hour a day sketching from now until this summer, maybe making allowences for midterms and finals 
Unfortunately not very well yet…
It’s great you’ve got a polished site together, but your cog-sci background isn’t showing through here. Start with your target user of this site: what are their goals? How many links are they likely/willing to click? What are they looking for in a design intern?
My advice:
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Don’t waste your homepage! Many may never venture much further than this, so use it wisely to communicate information about yourself. Who is Joey Roth? (Hint, you might want to drop the word DESIGN somewhere!)
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Add process! Those unfinished ‘ideation’ stories are the most important insight into your process–what makes you a good, practical designer vs. a fine-artist
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Follow usability conventions–make your links look like links (I completely missed the sub-links on my first visit), your ‘logo’ a home button etc. Ask a friend/stranger to visit your site and observe them: what do THEY click on? (Also check your page-hits!)
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Flatten your IA: one page per product, no more!! Give more context than obtuse names like ‘ise’ and ‘barsukov’ that force the user to click to find out more about something they might be interested in (waaay to much work for someone looking to hire an intern!)
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Best of luck!
Chris, thanks for the great advice. I was showing this site to as many friends as I could to test for usability, but I think they felt inclined to click on every link in order because they were “testing” the site, not mirroring actual patterns of natural use. I will definitely add more immediate descriptions for my projects, and put something up on the home page. Your idea of a brief biography and what kind of work I’m looking for sounds good.
Great projects - very inspiring. Especially the LED lamp (I did a USB-powered lamp in school as well, I also posted it under the ‘projects’ section here)
I agree with cg - the navigation is a bit confusing and asks the viewer to do a lot of clicking that they may or may not feel compelled to do and your home page is pretty non-descript.
But re: your sketches (I think I was looking at them under the ‘ideation’ links) they seem pretty polished actually. Not sure if you did them by hand or Illustrator or what. Definately not the usual style associated with ID’ers, but IMO that is a good thing. I will agree that they do not show how you came to your final design, and this is one area you should work on…
Nice! Those few changes have made it much more effective/usable.
Now the minimal design says “efficient” where before it said “artsy.”
One thing I notice is that your “ise” and “parrish” projects have a keyline around them when you rollover the links to them. The other projects have no keyline. If you did this on purpose, I have no reference to why this was done. If this was not on purpose, change it so all of them are consistant… design is about details…
Overall nice site… keep on sketching!
Thanks for the crit guys. I fixed the keyline problem, and added my logo to the front page. I’m going to add a moss project in the near future.
Very nice site and the projects are all easy to understand
one question : why do you hide the dots beside the “home”? I mean, "projects cv contact home and “…”?
thanks zarajan. the dots are my clumsy way of spacing out the words. I have very little experience making web pages with HTML. A complete site update is in the works, and I’ll really be able to get cracking on it once finals are over for this semester.