George's Portfolio! (feedback please)

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1

Hi,

I am graduating (in May) Industrial Designer from the University of Kansas. I have just wrapped up my first draft of my online portfolio (I was inspired by Andrew Kim). This portfolio is tailored towards an industrial designer or design research/strategy position.
Please post any feedback you have.

The url is: George's Portfolio: Projects

My specific question:
Is this too much project information to send as a job application?

Thanks everyone I really appreciate the feedback?

George!

2

I’ve only had a chance to have a quick look through but here are my initial comments…

  1. Where are the images on the home page?
  2. ‘George can Design’ - it comes across as mildly arrogant. For you to pull it off I would expect your word to be astronomically good (it’s nice - but not quite to that level yet)
  3. Painless Vac project - there is a huge amount of info here, but when you get to any sketches they are tiny. Also the flow is slightly confusing - but I didn’t read it all so maybe that is why. I would recommend that you think about how you can distill this down to still get the process across but in slightly more digestible chunks. Also, some nice white space might help the viewer grab a breath every now and then.
  4. Egg - better presentation here, but still there is a lot to take in and just no chance for the viewer to focus on anything due to the lack of white space
  5. The same goes for the other projects

There is some nice work in there, but it might be worth trying to put it in a more web-friendly format… there is only so much scrolling you can do before your eyes start to struggle…

3

Firenzee,

Thanks for the quick feedback, my responses

  1. The idea of images on project list page, well I didn’t think of that, so great idea there.
  2. I was worried the title would seem arrogant…I was just trying to a simply as possible capture the intent of the portfolio, which is to present my ability to design. Thanks for you honesty, and I will have to re-think the title.
  3. I agree there is a metric ton of information of the vaccination project. It was my thesis project and so it is just huge. I have a really hard time editing and cutting things out. But if the reader is not even getting to my concept because they are bogged down in the beginning I have to suck it up and cut some things out.

Overall I think your points about the title and the pages being visually overloading are something I need to address.
Thanks for your reply!

-I just edited the title to something less brass, “George’s portfolio” It is a bit generic but it will be better than George can design for now.

4

Hi George - really like your Portfolio, the only drawback is the pages in each project run right through each other: maybe a break is needed?
I like the indepth exploration you go through, but if you show all this off now what will you have to show at the interview? I guess this is reflecting what firenzee is saying. You want to intrigue the viewer/employer but i find its an endless scroll and want to get to the next project.
Also i found there was no easy way to get to the other projects other than using the back button. You maybe restricted by the blog format but something to consider.
Hope this helps.

5

@j_lev
-I know what your saying about it being one big long page for the projects. Maybe a little more white space will help this. I am really conflicted on what depth to show on this. I want to completely open each project for everyone to see, but I want it to be interesting enough for someone to read through it all.
-The navigation in blogger is tricky. Since it treats each page as a blog post I am kind of limited to what I can do to navigate between projects. One idea I had is to put a link at the bottom of each project to go back to the project selection page or to the next project.
Thanks for your feedback

6

Hi everyone,

I just updated the main project (Hug: Painless Vaccinations).
I addressed a couple of things in the update:
-The type overall is small making the layout a little less crowded feeling.
-I took the research off the main page and linked it to its own page, so those who want to read into the project can
-I added a link at the bottom of the project page to go back to the project menu page

Let me know what you think!

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~Update~

I just re-freshed the project menu page with images of each project
@firenzee thanks for the suggestion

8

I’m going to start by saying that I think blogspot is a pretty poor venue to host your portfolio on. There are plenty of simple portfolio hosting sites such as Cargo Collective or Indexhibit that can display your work more professionally.

I also find the graphic layout and presentation style of your portfolio to be a bit distracting. It’s hard to concentrate on the actual substance of your work when each one of your presentation boards has a different style on their own, there aren’t clear breaks between different spreads, and hierarchy/typography issues are present. I think it would be a very good idea to revisit each of your projects and apply a general/coherent style across all of them. Getting inspiration from web infographics (the ones on good.is are wonderful examples) will help you create a better design.

On your home page, the image/buttons you’re using to display each project look like they’re inactive because you have the opacity turned way down. You can achieve the same effect you’re going for by keeping the opacity to 100 and putting a background behind your text to prevent it from being lost:
hug.jpg

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@linda_dong
I really like your suggestion for getting rid of the opacity fade on the home page images, after you said they look like inactive links now that is all i see!
Your suggestion about creating a single graphical style across all the projects is spot on too. I found myself using a different typeface on each project which at the time seemed like a good idea…but it does not look so great when the projects are presented together.
Also I have requested a cargo invite…twice but I still have not heard back yet. And I am going to look into indexhibit I have never heard of them before. I think blogger was nice for getting me started but i have really been feeling its limitations as i try and find tune my portfolio so I am really going to explore more options.
Also if anyone has a cargo invite to share I would love to join!

~Update~
I got a cargo invite finally!
Also I re-worked the home page images to be full opacity

10

Last night I received some valuable feedback from a friend. After she looked through my portfolio she said I need to really think about levels of communication and where they belong in the job application process
For the job application
1-Teaser (show your skills and create interests in yourself)
2-Process (show at least one project’s process so employers know you can think)
For the job interview
3-Full portfolio (show everything about the project and talk through the project)

Thinking about it like this gave me an ‘ah ha’ moment.
I am going to re work my portfolio, condense it majorly, and repost in in a new thread to get some fresh feedback.

Thank you those who looked through and provided feedback to the dense collection of work i posted originally.