Final portfolio

So it’s nearly 1 am and I’m sitting here mentally and physically exhausted. I know this past week i’ve spent atleast 12hours a day in front of my computer trying to get all my finals done. I’m not a procrastinator.. not a big one anyway. No I just bit off more than i can chew.

updates for my website:

After quite a bit of going back and forth Jeremy finally point blank told me to stop trying to be something I’m not. I tried really hard to make my website (and my brand) more playful than I actually am. So I stuck to my scheme and tried to make it work the best I could.

 

Changes:

where to start? The type I feel is a little stronger. I changed the h1s, h2s, h3s, and h4s so that they all actually worked in the right order. The background color is my “teal” color and Im not sure how i feel about it. It’s really bold, which is what I’m going for, but maybe it’s TOO in your face? I added more content to all my pages, but the final images are coming over break when I have time to take them. I made a series of icons and buttons that I’m starting to encorporate into my site.

I was able to fix the jquery slider too! It turns out this <no script> code at the end messed EVERYTHING up. weird huh?

I think the main thing is that I’ve done a crazy amount of work in one day (because this past week I havent had a scrap of time to work on it).

The important thing is that I’ve established a good base and now over the next 12 weeks (eeeeek!) I will be perfecting it.

Room for improvement:

I very much would like to also add a photography page

I also want to add those icons in where I can.

I want to add a different “portfolio” page, one that actually shows my laid out portfolio from issuu.com and a “download my resume” button.

I have to finish my about page by adding my design heroes and favorite designers etc.

 

Still not fixed:

that carosel idea didn’t work. I really need some hard core one on one time to get that figured out, so in the mean time, I added a “tags” section which will eventually lead to other projects tagged with the same words (oh boy),

my biggest issue is that I STILL can’t get my @font face to work on fire fox. I checked on Jeremy’s safari and It worked, just not fire fox. If i don’t get ANYTHING else fixed, i must get this fixed. The fonts are key to making it all look consistent, without it it looks poorly designed. I plan on bringing screenshots in to show incase my fonts don’t show up.

Portfolio Site

I’m not so sure this is visible, but here’s a screen shot of my code for my portfolio page. To get a better Idea of what that looks like, I’ve included a screenshot of the design view:

Ive set my divs up so that each image an caption is in it’s own div. The outer images are in the “outtercollumn” div and the inner ones in the “inner collumn” div. They are all set to float left and the inner collumn gets margins on either side. This way It has a very grided effect. My plans are to have a small discription and a “view project” button.

I really liked the idea of large icons with captions to grab your attention for each project. I added drop shadows and rounded corners (of which my inner collumn for some reason isnt working. I will fix it soon).

There’s still much to do, and I’m making good progress (it just doesn’t look like it because i havent “FINISHED” one thing. I make small changes to each page as I think of it.

 

I’ve gotten the type under control as well as the RSS feed. YAY! I also figured out how to embed my issuu.com publications for my mac and theBalm pages:

http://lorettamaydesign.com/pages/mac.html

http://lorettamaydesign.com/pages/thebalm.html

 

I found a website that i’ve really taken a liking to and am using for inspiration:

http://ribbonsofred.com/pobkephotography.html

 

I really am excited to see this finished. I just need to really make a decision and stick with it.

button

For homework, I had to follow a photoshop tutorial and create a button for my website. I decided to make a “download my resume” button. Here it is!:

 

Landing pages

I had already started designing my landing page when I read the article by smashing magazine Design to sell. They had some good ideas about how to make people stay on your landing page once they get there. They talked about subliminal suggestion, where you play a photo of something positive that denotes the kind of tone you are going for, but I don’t think that would work well for me.

They also talked about preventing choice parallisys, by highlighting one choice above all others. That makes sense for a service, but might look a little silly on a portfolio site.

The one I did however take away was “Showing the product”. On my front page, I have a “latest work” section which I think really demonstrates showing the product or services that I can provide.

Letting people try it doesn’t apply to me because I don’t work for free.

I was really interested in the AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) and “always provide next actions” idea. I definitely plan on having a “browse more”, or “go to portfolio page” next to the “latest work” section. It isn’t there yet, but that is the plan. I will also go back through my website and make sure there is an “action” the viewer can take with every page, whether it’s “like this? Tweet it!” or “like this? contact me” or even “like this? see more like this”

The guided attention was also interesting. I will see if I can add in some element that makes things flow better, but I don’t want to force it. I won’t add in a design element that just doesn’t make sense for the sake of creating a metaphorical arrow.

I already knew about the gutenberg rule, but I will double check my pages and make sure the important stuff is in the top left and right.

Overall I feel very confident about the direction of my portfolio. I still have a lot of images to add in and pages to make, but now that the template is set, it shouldn’t take too long. Most of my blurbs are already written too.

Patrick Schwedtfeger

Last week we had Patrick Schwerdtfeger come speak with us about the importance of social media for business. I already knew a lot about how social media sites such as linked in and twitter could help your business, but he extended that to commonly used platforms like facebook and youtube. His over all message was just “POST IT. don’t make excuses. Get as much content out there on as many different servers and outlets as possible.” He had some great ideas about how to get other people to pretty much do your advertising for you. He was going to hold a contest where if you buy his book and take a photo of yourself holding the book in a store, you get your name put into a contest. Quite frankly, I thought that was rediculous, but I understand why he did it. That prize better be damn good if i’m going to drag myself AND 10 of my friends (because if you have more people there in the photo, you get more entries) to the store to take this photo.

Overall I did learn a few things, like how to search for key words on twitter. That was a nice little feature I didn’t know about. I’m glad I went because it inspired me to go home and add more content to a few of my online portfolio sites:

http://www.behance.net/Lorettamaydesign

http://www.krop.com/lorettamay/

I still have to update my deviantart site. It has a mishmash collection of my art and illustration, but very little design work.

and I made a new account at creativehotlist.com and literally two days later got a client email me and ask me to do a logo for them. So that was pretty cool.

Targeting the right market

First off  I researched what a target market actually is..

According to my online marketing professor, Joseph Kukella, “A target market is a specifically defined audience that has been identified as a potential consumer of a product or service” (myclassonline.com). Generally a target market is defined by a demographic and a psychographic.

Demographics define the statistical data: age, gender, income, education, occupation, marital status, family size, and location of residence

“Psychographics are characteristics attributed to lifestyle, attitudes, emotions, and ideological beliefs” (kukella, myclassonline.com).

My target audience is:

Employers of small businesses, startups, or small design firms looking for package design, identity design, or print media. I am also targeting my peers to come and look at my blog, share their experiences and network.

My targeted employer would be male or female ranging in age from 30 – 40 years old, employed and middle class to upper middle class (designers CAN make a lot of money).  I also hope to reach a San Francisco or bay area based company. The targeted company would be smaller so that I can “wear many hats” or have a lot of responsibility. I like being able to do a project from start to finish, wich is why I also look for freelance clients. I really hope to reach a company that has an art director or creative director position that is not the actual owner of the company. I find that owners with no design experience make poor design decisions when starting their business that are often subjective and biased toward their own likes and dislikes, which hurts the company in the long run.

My targeted peer audience (for my blog) would be female and male designers aged 20 – 30 that are as passionate about design as I am. They would range from poor college students, to middle class students that can afford the luxury of design magazines, books, and gadgets. I target the computer junkie designer that loves to sit on the computer and network, reading blogs and tweets and sharing their opinions. According to Allbusiness.com, “Niche marketing can be very beneficial and cost-effective if done properly”, which makes me  think that the designer that favors illustration and hand made design skills over typography and clean design would appreciate my blog and style best (http://www.allbusiness.com/).

Lastly, it is my passion and dream that one day I create my own set of stationery/apparel line and sell it through another company.

Some of the companies below are companies with similar styles and philosophies that I admire.

 

 

Papaya Art - Mixed media, collage, japanese and fine art inspired stationery

vintage, typography biased letter press located in SF.

 

well known company that is known for all different styles

Design Firms I’m Interested In

 

Chen Design - featured many times in communication arts, created this book on 100 design ideas.

 

Elixir Design - publishing, packaging, identity, promotions

Altitude - Brian Singer's company. I know him personally through AIGA.

 

*note* you cannot view my source from joseph kukella because I had to log into my online marketing class lecture to get that quote. I can copy and paste the whole thing for you if you need.

quest for the best book

So i bought Adobe dreamweaver cs5 Classroom in a book, and i feel a little gyped. I’m looking through it and it seems really basic. I will probably return it. I don’t need ot know how to set up a dream weaver document. I don’t need to know about basic html tags. I want the intermediate stuff!

 

I’m thinking of getting a book about html 5

 

this one is the same company that created the first book i had and i really liked that one…

Website sketches

Here are my two sketches for webdesign:

Purpose of the site:

The site is supposed to serve as  ”one stop shop” for me. It has my Porftolio, my blog, and my other social networking information. The main message i want it to say is “im a freelance graphic designer and I’m open for business”

Target audience:

Future employers (both freelance and design firms), mostly packaging, branding, and print media employers.

Objective:

Design a clear and organized website that features my work and blog.

This one is a clean and minimal design, using a right collumn navigation and a large center area for content.

This one is classified by a large header area that has "big type blurb", a horizontal navigationm and a three column area that has "contact me", "latest in my blog", "latest tweet". The gallery page would be a four colums of medium sized thumbnails.

I combined the two together: Large type navigation (right aligned), Large type blurb, Latest from my portfolio section Latest from my blog/ twitter.

volume two

The essential guide to showcasing your design work online

So here are the two books I bought for my Web Design for Graphic Designers class. I was looking for the idea book when I came across the Creating your own digital portfolio one and HAD to have that one too! It breaks it up into four chapters: Strategy, content, going live, and maintenance.