Or, how to design a portfolio site.
For this project I knew I wanted the design to be clean, the visual focus of the site had to be on the portfolio pieces, this was my number one priority.
With that in mind I started backwards- I knew I would have to implement some sort of thumbnail display for my works and I would want the videos and images to pop up in a lightbox. I also wanted my reel to be the most prominent element on the video section of the site. While the site will include most of my work, I understand that most people don’t want to go through all of my work, they just want to watch the compilation reel. This is specially true if I plan on using the site to try to garner employment.
This led me to a structure of 3 pages, one for video, one for web designs and one for print designs, each one sharing a very similar layout. I started creating the video page as a basis for the other ones.
Initially I had the idea of a vertical navigation menu, and you can see that in some of the designs below. After some experimenting I realized that the vertical navigation did not look as good and created weird spacing. The weird spacing issues eventually lead to the idea of using side scrolling and in the end I went back to designing on a very tight grid. You can see it in the final design below.