portfolio examples
This task is to research some examples of different types of portfolios including both student and professionals to compare the differences and identify which I deem the best fit for myself and to display all of my work.
personal website
Below is a screenshot of a game developers web portfolio by Pierre Stempin, the way he’s laid out the site is quite interesting as he’s included every section of work he’s produced and put them into groups of when or why he did them, for example student projects and personal projects. I think separating your personal work from the professional pieces such as student assignments and work you’re being paid to do can sum up your development style because whoever is viewing can clearly see whether you work well under schedules as well as on your own time.
This being said, the example I’ve shown isn’t particularly great in a visual sense, the titles are bland with a plain boring text and has very poor spelling, the front page is fairly un-professional, for example the use of a sideways smiley face being displayed after the title of the welcome screen.
Other than the spelling errors, poor font choice and un-professionalism, the background color contrasts rather well with the choice of font color and the menus are laid out efficiently and would suit presenting many forms of work including student projects, finished work, sketches, drawing and ideas generation, in my opinion for reasons explained above. If I were to create a portfolio of this style I would definitely make some alterations to his design choice.
There are some ways of obtaining your own personal website for free however most will require some payments to obtain a relatively good looking site to keep it looking professional.
Artstation
Using Artstation as a portfolio is a very common way of displaying your work as you can create your own website dedicated to your work for free and pay a little extra to change up the design slightly. I already have an Artstation account with a few of my work published however I don’t think they’re presented particularly well and aren’t laid out in separate menus which is something I can do to my own website to improve of the layout. In the example below I think other than the design style being rather simple and quite boring including background being plain black/grey, the layout is rather simplistic yet professional looking. The font style and color are also simplistic with a contrast of white and black making the menus and important information easily visible allowing you to navigate with ease.
Uploading a project onto Artstation also uploads it to your free website published via Artstation for free, when you upload a project they give you a huge variety of choices to upload items from Sketchfab, Marmoset viewer as well as uploading images to display development such as sketches, photobashes, reference images and others. You can also add videos and panoramic which are more or less pointless in my opinion as Sketchfab already does this.
Due to the huge variety of choice they give you for uploading, I think this is possibly the best way to display your portfolio online to a professional standard. I will most likely go through my old portfolio I made to be ahead of schedule and change up a few things to make it look more professional and lay out my models in separate menus.
portfolio providers
square space
Square Space is an extremely clean website which provides you with the option to make many sites including shops, blogs, portfolios and more. At first glance the website seemed to be free however I tried to sign up to see what it was like and it turns out that it costs £10 a month after a 14-day free trial. Although it costs money, I can see why that is, because the various layouts and alterations available to build your site are extremely visually appealing and a lot of the themes look very professional which I will show an example of below.
Although this website costs money, the layouts and designs available are extremely suitable for me to create a professional portfolio in terms of development process, however I’m not sure whether I’d be able to display 3D views of my assets/scenes produced and therefor is not particularly great in my opinion.
artstation
This site allows you to upload all of your work including the development of the work itself using images, videos, sketchfab, marmoset viewer and 360 panoramic views to display them. As explained above, they provide a free website for you to build your portfolio and whenever you upload to the Artstation site, the work automatically is displayed on your portfolio itself.
There isn’t a huge variety of layouts, color schemes, font styles or color however they make up for this in my opinion in the way they allow you to display your work, also a HUGE plus is that the website is completely free unless you want to upgrade which will allow you to further change the design of your portfolios color, theme and possibly fonts.
This is currently the highest contender for me right now as there is such a huge dynamic to the way things work with the website in terms of being discovered fairly easily, being able to apply to jobs within the site itself giving the employer the ability to easily check your portfolio as well as having the ability to take part in challenges which allow you to further develop on your work skill-set and increase the contents of your portfolio.
James' 2nd Year - Level 3 