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Show DN: New Portfolio - Feedback? (Designer / Engineer / Artist / Musician)

5 years ago from , Founder at Qwilr.com

A lot of weekend-warrior-time has gone into my revised portfolio: http://dylanbaskind.com

For a little background on the design challenge: my professional history is quite diverse i.e. at various times: designer, developer, founder, musician - and on the side, I'm also an amateur (but dedicated) visual artist.

Obviously that's a wide spectrum of content for one site. For many years I had these various pursuits broken out into individual micro-sites - but it always feels silly giving people like 7 urls when they ask about my work...

With this portfolio refresh I wanted to to coherently house all these various pursuits under one roof. The latest http://dylanbaskind.com is the result.

I'd love some feedback / thoughts / constructive criticism from the DN community?

16 comments

  • Matt Anderson, 5 years ago

    Nice job combining all the different facets of your life. The logo animation is baller too!

    I'm a little confused as to whether this portfolio mean to be a place to get more work or just somewhere you can show off your work. It currently seems geared towards the latter.

    1+ for the category filter on the homepage.

    P.S. where in Sydney are you?

    2 points
    • Dylan BaskindDylan Baskind, 5 years ago (edited 5 years ago )

      Yo Matt,

      re: logo animation - haha thanks man. I actually wanted to do something a little more whiz-bang; but didn't get around to it in the end.

      Yehp, I should have been more specific in my post - this portfolio is NOT professional in intent.

      I've been full-time with my company https://qwilr.com for quite some time now. So the site is more geared towards dinner-party chat: "So besides running the company, what do you do?" - and instead of rambling, I can just point people to this site.

      Sydney locale: residing Darlinghurst / offices in Surry Hills.

      Are you rockin' in Sydney-town?

      D.

      0 points
      • Matt Anderson, 5 years ago

        Ahh cool, it serves that purpose well then.

        Yeah I'm up on the Northern Beaches, though often head into the city a few times a week for work.

        Should catch up sometime…

        0 points
  • Richard BallermannRichard Ballermann, 5 years ago

    Everything looks fairly slick, so good job on the design. I struggled with this myself coming out of school being and wanting to show off my illustration, design, motion and photography chops: selling too many skills can be a little confusing for prospective clients. They won't be able to remember you for any one particular skill and the takeaway will only be as strong as your weakest link.

    What are you REALLY good at? You can draw, but the examples you show are not what I would consider at the level of a marketable skill to promote for illustration or concept work. This starts to detract from the amount of polish you're showing in your design work.

    Honestly and truly judge the level of each of these skills you're promoting. Design and illustration are justifiable skills for one person to promote if they are both truly honed and at a professional level but fine art projects and design work have no real connection, placing them side by side makes a very confusing and aimless pitch to your clients. Pick out the work you think you can sell in order to get people to hire you, all other work that is personally driven without client input should be kept elsewhere.

    1 point
  • Stefan ZweifelStefan Zweifel, 5 years ago

    I would move some stuff away from the homepage or as others said: Reduce the size of your images and add some sort of lazy loading.

    Chrome tells me your homepage is 10 MB and was loaded in 20 seconds. I waited because I wanted to see your portfolio. Potential customers will probably never see the homepage if it takes this long to load the page.

    Not a rant, just some feedback :)

    0 points
    • Dylan BaskindDylan Baskind, 5 years ago

      Heya Stefan,

      Definitely --- My perception of load-times has been warped by having the VPS hosting the static files like literally kilometres away, and the AWS S3 data centre, also incredibly close. (Though I think a fair portion of that 10mb is probably from the header video?).

      Lazy loading the homepage images is a must.

      Thank you kindly for the page-load optimisation thoughts.

      D.

      0 points
  • Taylor Van OrdenTaylor Van Orden, 5 years ago

    Nice work.

    As someone with incredibly slow internet at the moment, you might want to look into decreasing the size of your images (especially on your homepage) or implement some sort of lazy loading. I probably got halfway down before I started seeing the images of the grid. It was especially janky since hovering over the currently-invisible images still resulted in the hover-overs showing up.

    I have a 27" monitor but I'm getting 50ms ping and 1mb down right now.

    Beyond that, really nice work. Your typography is spot on and you have the right balance of minimalist without being generic and clean without being boring.

    0 points
    • Dylan BaskindDylan Baskind, 5 years ago

      Heya Taylor,

      Thanks for taking the time to look it over!

      Yehp (as I said to Stefan above); I think my page-load perception got dulled by having my servers / S3 data centres so close.

      The site could also do with having a CDN to serve the image files...

      Definitely something I'll address before pushing the portfolio out into the big-wide-world.

      Thank-ya-kindly for the feedback!

      D.

      0 points
  • Phil Smith, 5 years ago

    Kudos on your site & your work – good job.

    Feedback: I know you can click on the various roles and filter work that way, but I am still left wanting to be able to filter the work by category on the homepage.

    There’s my 2¢.

    Cheers.

    0 points
  • Bradley Ryan, 5 years ago

    Love it. One of the best portfolios I've seen.

    0 points
  • Joshua Eichler-SummersJoshua Eichler-Summers, 5 years ago

    Also you're linking to dead twitter page: https://twitter.com/dylan-baskind

    0 points
  • Joshua Eichler-SummersJoshua Eichler-Summers, 5 years ago (edited 5 years ago )

    Man! Loved the keyboard thing. Very subtle. Brought a smile to my face. Well done.

    Also really like the intro with you sketching.

    My only negative would be the layout of your work. Found it very unstructured and a bit over complicated.

    I think breaking up the work by different types would be easier to handle and also giving each piece of work a title that you don't only see on hover (where you can no longer see the image).

    E.g.

    Code:

    • w1

    • w1 title

    • w2

    • w2 title

    Art:

    • w1

    • w1 title>

    • w2

    • w2 title

    etc... (but horizontal)

    Cool site tho. Again. Love the keyboard.

    0 points
    • Dylan BaskindDylan Baskind, 5 years ago (edited 5 years ago )

      Heya Joshua,

      Thanks for thoughts!

      Haha yeh the keyboard / mouse - you discovered my easter egg :)

      Re: the break-down of the work. Indeed, this was something I went back and forth on repeatedly during the design.

      There was originally an "index" piece that presented the work in a more structured / taxonomical way. Then I ditched it for a randomly sized assemblage. Then flipped back to the site-map concept. Then back to the current format, but grouped by category - but that didn't seem to sing as much, visually.

      Not sure I've really cracked that nut yet.

      PS: Thanks for the broken links heads-up. "Spends A Zillion Hours Creating Site / Links Are Broken" - there's a tee-shirt in there somewhere.

      0 points