Portfolio, early build.

It isn't fully done, but here is an early build of my portfolio site:

http://halcyon-graphics.com/eric_portfolio/

Feel free to give me any constructive criticism, keeping in mind that it is an early build with placeholder text and graphics.

All graphics (though bits and pieces of the individual works may contain photographs from other people, mainly in the Photoshop & website sections) and programming done by me

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

I love the steampunk-y design

Normally, I'd throw a book (a small, plush one) at you for making it entirely in FLASH, but it loaded fairly quickly (have you tested it on machines with slower connections, though? Just to be safe - I'm on 3mbps high-speed after all), and it was fairly well done and unobtrusive after the initial load.

The animations were also both light, and very smooth, and the site itself had a very nice 'feel' to it and the colors all worked very well. Some of the font choices I'd probably groan about, but they were all very easy to read and lent some additional artistry to it as well (in addition to being thematic).

I give you a solid seven out of nine tails for the design and layout - very slick looking, Snow_Globe!

EDIT: On the entire 'placeholder graphics' bit, I can see a bit of cleaning up being involved (to smooth it out some), but I think keeping it simple like it is right now wouldn't detract from anything. Heck, I rather like it.

Yes, I've tested it on a few very slow connections (overloaded school network on the final day of classes tends to slam connections ).

As to it being entirely in Flash, that was on advice given from a senior teacher. The advice was that if I was going to require Flash for anything on the site, I might as well make the whole thing there.

Step two will have each section load from external files (yeah, the whole thing is one file currently -- deadlines suck) which should only serve to improve loading times. As it stands the whole site is just over 1 MB in size.

I have 3 months of Portfolio class to do clean up and improvements... Starting next week.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

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I love the steampunk-y design

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Nemesis!!

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I love the steampunk-y design

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Nemesis!!

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It's all a plot, for sure.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

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I like the steampunk look of it too, but to me, the white is too white. I know that you want to present yourself as best you can, but given the theme I think a little bit of grunge would finish it off. If I were you, I'd darken up the colors a bit, maybe add an oil smudge or something on the white and put a few dings in the metal. It's all kinda uniform right now and doesn't have any little details that make you go "ooh". The meters going near the bottom almost do it, but not quite enough imo.

Also, I didn't notice it the first time I looked... But I really like your HG logo. It blends in with the wood though, I'd try to make it pop a bit more.

Snow,

Awesome design/concept going on there, but there's a few things that stick out, somewhat in a fine-tuning sense and you did say you were still working on parts (just unsure which parts, so I'll point these out anyway). While the gilded/gold work is good, they all have a rough edge to them that is distracting and gives them an impression of being stamped out of paper. Smoothing out those hard edges will give them a more ingrained feeling that would make them appear pressed and raised from the wooden surface and remove the "fake" feeling. Also with the wood work, the main plank for the site looks good, but the checkerboard background pulls away from the central focus. I'd suggest either lowering the intensity of the background by fading it, replacing it with a flat light tan, or sticking to a solid horizontal light wood grain to oppose the vertical grain of the dark wood to help the eye float down the page without being pulled away of confused.

The title bar/plate at the top of the page, the areas on the edge that you can see through to the wood below you can also see your link bars beneath it while they drop out. You might consider hiding that beneath the wood work or using flash to cut so the animation flows out from beneath the "Halcyon Graphics" plate and not post from behind hit so that its not visible while it drops down. In general though that part is pretty smooth, and, just because it'd be pretty cool with the steam punk feel you have, if when the links drop down a puff of steam were to animate from somewhere would be a nice touch further on down the road (just as an aside idea )

The left and right arrows on the side (I assume for some form of navigation?) their bars feel disjointed when they meet the edges of the frame. They don't feel connected to anything, or that they should be bolted at the edges maybe. Also, at the bottom of the page where the gears are-the color of the gears blends to fluidly with the gold work and makes it hard to discern where one begins and the other ends. Darkening the gears a bit and or "dirtying" them up a bit would help both add to the realism of the system, give it some depth, and help seperate the pieces better.

As for the white a few people have mentioned. It is a bit over bearing and toning it down to an ivory or off-white might help a bit, or a light cream to keep the theme and still give you a flat clean backing for your text/content.

Something else I wanted to say was that you have a pretty sleek logo with the geared 'HG' and that you should give it some more use, but then again I couldn't say how or where because it's already in some pretty good places, just that with the "Halcyon" plate it almost doesn't seem that the logo is important in comparison.

Thanks you all for your comments so far.

To address a few points:
* Plans for random steam and having those two large handle moving are in the works.
* Trying to decide on either fixed plates for the left/right navigation arrow (yes, that is what they are) or have them animate out of the sides of the content area.
* Plans for an odometer to be added for fluff/displaying page number (ooh factor).
* Said odometer will also provide a nice progress indicator for loading content.
* A few (seriously not many) lights to add a bit of flair. I'm a bit leery of adding too much more though.

* Going to try a better treatment for the HG logo.
* I'll do what I can about the "clean" edges and the white screen (it is an off-white, but you can only tell with a few pictures). I'll try to make a the "glass" a bit less smooth/perfect.
* I can grunge the site up (example is modern industrial, but will not go that far ). I have to fix that site a bit too (more outside images used, but that was only a student project) .
* Will dirty up the gear work.
* I'll try some different treatments for the background tiles. Maybe combining the HG logo.

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The title bar/plate at the top of the page, the areas on the edge that you can see through to the wood below you can also see your link bars beneath it while they drop out. You might consider hiding that beneath the wood work or using flash to cut so the animation flows out from beneath the "Halcyon Graphics" plate and not post from behind hit so that its not visible while it drops down.

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Tried that, but actually liked the more mechanical feel of the exposed machinery better. I might add some small gear work to the pull-downs, like an exposed inside of a watch.

Oh, I did try to make the HG golden, but it got lost in the rest of the details (even more so than currently).

Anyways, I'll post a static image with some updates in a day or two. The more work I can get done while on my school break, the better for me in September for my Portfolio showing.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

I'm not any sort of webdesigner but to reduce the effect of the white put it behind a glass screen, like a tube TV, you can leave some dirt and smudge in the edges where it meets the gold but i am not sure that fits well with the style, then you can tint the glass and shadow the page to take some of the hardness of the white away.

The gauges at the bottom. It sounds like you're planning on using them to show loading progress and position. That works for me, again the glass covering could reduce the impact of the white. Labeling the loading bar 'pressure,' would keep in line with the steampunk feel, the hands on those gauges don't feel steampunk, maybe make them a litte more ornate. That's perhaps just my interpretation of steampunk. Styleized steam power seems to be the direction you're taking, y'know nemesis rather than Firefly or Bioshock. It's your site tho and looks really cool so far.