I emailed Alan Dalby, my Guru, my PDF portfolio to get some feedback on it and the following is that feedback.
Nice opening page, it’s good that you’ve started to brand yourself and your work seems to have a consistent feel to it.
Theres a few things you can change in your portfolio, that at the moment are detracting from your work.
Flipping through the portfolio, it’s obvious that the logo isn’t in the same place on each page. It jumps around from page to page.
The easiest way to do this is to learn some very basic inDesign, but you can do this on photoshop too. (it’ll be a bit harder to get it in place though)
Basically, make a master page with your logo on it, and make sure you use the same one for every page. Make sure your images don’t jump around too.
It will make the portfolio consistent, less distracting, and more professional looking.
I was unsure whether to have my logo and the image information in the same place or following the layout of the page so this advice put that to rest.
The other obvious thing is the quality of the images.
Ideally you want people to look at your work full-screen so they give it their full attention and It’s always worth bearing in mind that people will be viewing this on various sized monitors. Most of your images are pixelated when viewed full screen and the colours are washed out. (Maybe because it’s been saved as a Jpeg too many times)
This doesn’t really do the work any favours. make sure the PDF is large enough, with 72dpi images.
If you don’t have original files that are big enough, either, remake the work or don’t include it in the portfolio.
You want people focussing on the good qualities of the work, not the resolution of the PDF.
One final point. The drop shadow is quite nice to make the work stand out on the page and make it looks printed.
But the white from the drop shadow needs to match the page, you’ve got the white brighter than the page. Using InDesigns drop shadow will sort this.
Although I did use the InDesign drop shadow, and the images looked fine on my own screen, I'd never thought to check the way it looks on different computers and so this is really useful to think about. I suppose it's still strange to think of people I don't know looking at my work.
It’s just a few things, but it will really help your portfolio, and sorting these things out will mean people can focus more on your work and any criticism will be more helpful to you. I know criticism sucks, but I just want to help!
If you want any more advice in the future, feel free to contact me again.
It's really nice to have someone working in the field give me advice from what they're learning at the moment and I'm very grateful for his help. Thanks Alan, I'll be coming back for more!
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