SITE REVIEW: Industrial design portfolio

It takes something to beat jordan's portfolio, but here goes:

http://www.tom-risser.com/

What do you think?

for me at the moment it is very slow as in the buttons take a long time and i no i have slow interent but if i found this site i would have moved on because it was to slow, even thought i am sure that it has good things on it and i no it is very coool jsut need to be faster.

i like the scrollbar very koool, i say the whole site is a bit small. if you do make it biggger dont make it the whole screen lbut like make it cover 1 third of the screen

-sycofi5h

awesome site...but that's not what impressed me...it's more like your skills and your resume. However I do think that your site should have been...well not so slim. Kinda hard to read and browse. Makes u feel too clustered. Awesome portfolio and resume tho. I hope to have half those skills someday.

Very neat,

never seen a site approach like that before.
Personally i am a big fan of that and wish i had it in my portfolio,

did take a little while to load (even for my fast connection) but i waited.. worth the wait... perhaps your server is slow?

yeh i wish that i could make my own porfolio too that would be kool

Hi,

Yay ! A flash website. The site is well designed even though the style is minimalistic. I think the font saves your site because it's a non-standard one.

Your portfolio isn't well designed, it lacks in the point of ergonomy : I have to wait for all items to load and I don't know whether I can have a look at the first ones already loaded. You should use an xml or database, store the paths of the images to display at first with the titles and as the user wants to see one of your artwork, a new loading appears.

Moreover, sometimes your font isn't correctly embed, this is especially noticeable with white texts on black backgrounds (it's blured).

Ah mais lol en plus je vois que t'es francais. Dernier truc que j'ai trouvé bien c'est que qd je clique sur un bouton dans Contacts, il devient gris clair pour rappeler que je suis passé par là.

Finally, the site is good but there's not really an identity (except for the font). I think it needs more colours.

+

P.S : tu pourras juger d'un site flash que je vais poster pour les critiques.

Thanks for the comments, guys!

About the slow loading...

It 's a serious problem and I don't know how to fix it. Each portfolio item is a big flash (swf) file which is 100-200 kb in size. The reason they are so large is because each portfolio item consists of 2 or 3 very tall jpeg's which the user can 'scroll' through a mask. And if I make the whole website wider, the images will get even bigger!

The only way to reduce the size of the swf files is to either reduce the quality of the jpegs (which I'm very reluctant to do) or making the jpeg's shorter (which means people will see less of my work).

If anyone has tips on how to make the items load faster, I'm VERY interested to hear!



I really don't know...I know very little about servers. I store my website on Doteasy. I don't pay anything for it, so maybe it's a crappy server, hehe. Is there a utility progam to check out the server speed?



Actually, you only need to wait for the first item ('PageMark') to load. Then you can click on that button and look around. By the time you have seen it, the next item should have loaded - so you can go on and look at that one. Anyway that was my idea...no, you don't need to wait for ALL items to load. Should it be made more clear that the user can click on the buttons as they are fully loaded?



With the portfolio images the text (white text on black background) is in fact part of the jpeg image. That's probably why it doesn't look so good. I'll see if I can write that text in the flash editor instead.



More colours??? I'll see what I can do. But I'll want to keep it light and minimalistic, because it's part of my identity as a designer.

Sorry, Anty. I'm not French, hehe. I don't know the language either even though I live here ...I can only speak English and Norwegian. But French is definately next on the list! -and I look forwards to seeing your flash website.

geez what a post well i think you are right about the server being slow, if it is free the most likely it is slow.

-sycofi5h

I think it looks nice but like others said your portfolio takes a while to load.

yes very hard to read, i think it has huge potential .

As others have said, there is quite a long load time to start. The opening progress image loads up fairly quickly, but then the fade out and fade in of the little images (ideation, prototyping, 3D modelling) takes along time. After these are faded in, I attempted to click them as I thought they would be buttons. Nothing happens, and I have to wait another 5-10 seconds before the rectangle with the buttons appears. Seems like this is due to the way you've created the fades maybe. Are they frame based or time based fades? I'm on a pretty slow pc (p2 300), so often frame based stuff slows down for me. Time based stuff always takes the same time regardless of CPU.

As for the site layout itself, I quite like the idea you have used. But as others said, it might be a good idea to widen it slightly, maybe even twice the width? Also, when I click on the main logo at the top, it just seems to display the three little images again, which seems to be an error. I think that it should just be a simple link to reload the site.

Other than that, I think the little graphics (ideation, prototyping, 3D modelling) , that are displayed when viewing something in the portfolio section, should be displayed with the text description. I had trouble remembering what each one actually meant, until clicking them.

You definitely have some great skills, and the content is fairly good. Some of those projects are fantastic ideas. Have you actually developed all of those projects? How much for the Mountaineer?


Just found something else. If I click on the arrows to scroll, and then hold the mouse down and release outside of the button, the scroll just keeps going. Personally I kind of like it, but others may be annoyed by it. Probably just a matter of adding the onReleaseOutside handler to the buttons and making it the same as the onRelease handler.

I'd give it a 7/10 mostly because of the initial waiting period while stuff fades. I really like the concept, that's for sure.

Cheers,
Mike

Where's the page? It's way to small and squished, but not bad... the navigation is staight and easy, the scroll is alright but works. Just a bit over doing the scroll though... Maybe expand the page a tad so you can fit more content on it...(and a graphic or two)
good luck