Critique : Feedback for portfolio website design

Question

I'm in the early years of an aspiring web/graphic designer. The two main intentions behind creating this website were:

1. To get some practice
2. Use it as an online portfolio while hunting for jobs (Where I plan to learn more)

Here's the link to my website

http://projectilepixels.com/

I'm currently at a stage where I'm not happy with the way it looks, but am also failing to find faults and elements I'd want to change.

The only things I noticed are:

1. The number of colors used in the "progress bars" for PS, CorelDraw etc might be too many and I might need to tone em down a little (But am unsure what to use instead)
2. The shiny gradients used for the progress bars along with the shadow effects might be making it look to gaudy (again can't think of an alternative here)
3. Contrast, color etc on different images might need to be matched.

A few additional questions I have:

1. Is there anything else I am missing?
2. Is the use of fonts appropriate? What kind of fonts should I change to if these ain't right?
3. From a UX prespective, is this kind of concept user friendly

Hope this question has been crisp and concise as needed. Looking forward to some really helpful feedback. Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

Visually, it's cute. Nice work on that.

Structurally, it's lacking. When you have to explain what to click on to navigate the site, the navigation is broken. Asking a user to read that they need to click on an image of a balloon to actually get to the content of your site (the portfolio) is not intuitive.

I'd also rethink calling yourself 'crazy'. :)

Answer 2

One thing I noticed is your use of punctuations. You may use them as you like in informal situations, but if we're talking about professional typography, you need to remember these rules:

• Any punctuation mark only appears one at a time. You have used ??, .. and .... in many places. In your question too, you're missing them in some places.
• If you want to use ..., then the typographically correct way is to use the Unicode character U+2026 (…) instead of three full stops.
• There's a difference between hyphen (-) and dash (— U+2014). Hyphen is used to join words, like tic-tac-toe, while dash is used to separate parts of a sentence. (See below.)

Please refer to these rules by Butterick, particularly point 7 onwards.

Also watch your spelling, especially when you name brands. Always check Wikipedia for the official stylization.

For example:

My version of the famous thumbs up at - Aj kuch toofani karte hai

should be

My version of the famous Thums Up ad — Aaj kuch toofani kartey hain!

(It's also normally recommended to italicize words from a different language.)

That being said, your design is quite impressive and the concept is innovative.

Answer 3

There is a Playboy bunny rabbit logo on the tail of one of your planes. If you're in Mubai you don't know, but it's a magazine of naked women. You probably do not want that on a professional site!

Speaking of that, depending on what you want to show off, it might or might not be an issue that the graphics all on the front page came from somewhere else. People can find clip art of space shuttles and hot air balloons anyway. If you want to show off your programming skill then great, but ask programmers.

(It seems kind of easy to break because you can resize the window and sink the shuttle into the ground. The end position looks stuck...I can't imagine this works on the phone.)

You might want to have a more basic fallback page by default and call this your "experiment" that people who want to see click to. Then you can be like Google where you are in beta forever, and never be responsible if its broken.

"Is the use of fonts appropriate? What kind of fonts should I change to if these ain't right?"

Too small.

"From a UX prespective, is this kind of concept user friendly"

Confusing to scroll down, when the thing you're looking at is going up. I couldn't tell you for sure that it couldn't be made really tight or not. All things equal it's good to dare to be different, I'd worry more about people knowing what to click on, and using clip art on a page saying you're a designer as a first impression.

When you click through to that part of the things you made, the numbers are wrong and not in order. And it's hard to find the button to close it once you have it up. If you're flying by things why not fly through the art itself, or over it?

The portfolio design is one question but then it's a portfolio that is kind of hard to get to. You have the skill with software so a little bit could make a big difference I bet. So maybe if you look at things like the restaurant:

http://projectilepixels.com/beta/corel/brocdure.jpg

I'm not even going to talk about "new branch address here" (you need to fix that for a portfolio)! But like I said about clip art before you should ask if everything you make is out of clip art then where is your control? If the "75 years of Excellence" scroll has Excellence too close to the right and the 75 is too close to the left or the scroll is too small, why don't you control that? If the color of the red in the company logo isn't matching why don't you control that?

Someone paying you to do work expects you to control this and you should show you can if this is a portfolio about you being able to design. Unless you are going to not listen and just do programming work, then ignore me because you will be rich and it won't matter.

Answer 4

Wow it's awesome! The font is readable so it's appropriate in my opinion. It is user friendly except not everybody knows at e.g. 'connect' that they have to click the satellite to open up the contact form. Also: I saw this when I opened up the site:

Greetings