Interaction and Industrial Design, Narrative Portfolio

Hey everyone,
I’ve just finished making some updates to my portfolio site, and I would really love some feedback from this community. I’m focusing on building clear and engaging narratives around the projects, including the process itself. Could you let me know if you feel like I’m communicating well? Where could I develop a piece further? Where should I trim it down?

http://www.rachelilansimpson.com/portfolio

I would really appreciate any thoughts you might have!
Best,
Rachel Ilan

I really like how the vibrator project is presented. Why not present all your projects like that? The other ones I’m a little put off by how much text is in the description. Perhaps splitting the text up between the images in a project might help.

Personally, I’m not a fan of the text you used to describe the form development phase of Kleio. “A bit chunky, no?” strikes me as slightly unprofessional, but others may think different. Thats just my opinion. Also, it seems like you want the reader to read those images top-bottom, left-right but right now I’m reading it left-right, then top-bottom, which mixes up the order of the phases and confuses me at first glance.

I think its an interesting project and its well presented overall, I wish all your projects were presented in that fashion.

Overall, I also think bigger images might help, cause you have some nice ones in there and your site is pretty narrow on my screen right now.

Hope that was helpful!

Thanks for the feedback! I’m glad you mentioned the presentation of the Kleio project- it’s something new I’m trying to provide larger images. I’m a little concerned about the sizing of the text though, so I might play with that a bit.

Is it tiresome to scroll so much?

Cheers!

No, it’s not tiresome to scroll. The internet requires you to scroll. I would rather scroll than click and wait to load.

Some people like scrolling, some people like clicking. Either way is fine I think as long as its fast.

If every slide is a different page, then thats a no no I think.
If the slides are embedded in a clickable slideshow on the page, and it loads pretty instantly, I’d be fine with that.

But I think the good thing about scrolling is that you can quickly look back and reference previous slides. With clicking, you’d have to click back way too much.

A few things.

  1. I would make sure that the order you have your projects in the slideshow is the same in the column on the left hand side with the hot links to the full projects.

  2. In your about me section you go back and forth between 1st and 3rd person (eg: “drop me a line” vs “Rachel is an interaction designer”…) I suggest using 1st person when talking to your audience if your going for more of a “friendly, this is who I am vibe” vs “biographical feel”

As well I would cut down a bit of what you say about yourself/interests. Just the essentials like it says. Not that it is bad- just don’t know if it is necessary and people might get impatient.

  1. For the IDEO project I think there is too much text and description.

  2. for the 60 degrees project I am sure there was ALOT more process, people research, trend scrapes etc. that was done on that for deciding to go with the designs that you did.

Overall make sure, even though each project is different, that the layout and the way the info is presented is consistent.
eg: Decide if you like to tell the story by all process is in the back vs front. Then the audience can get a flow to the ‘bigger picture’ of your work more easily.

good work!