Fine-Tuning Your Portfolio Part 5 – Navigation
(Illustration by Melanie Matthews)
What follows is Part 5 of the ongoing Fine-Tuning Your Portfolio series, which offers suggestions on ways to maximize the effectiveness of your Illustration portfolio.
Navigation
Online portfolios are a handy, effective tool for presenting your Illustrations in a clean, professional format.
But they can also be a complete mess.
Have you ever considered how easy it is for an Art Director or other potential client to move around in your portfolio? Along with Presentation, it’s important to be aware of how the navigation of your portfolio affects the way a visitor views your work. The last thing you want an Art Director to do is leave your website in frustration because they can’t find your portfolio or because it’s too much of a hassle getting from one place to another.
In order to make the experience as seamless and satisfying as you possibly can, there are 3 key transitions to take note of when evaluating the navigation of your portfolio.
1. Website to Gallery
Obviously, you need to make your Illustration portfolio the centerpiece of your website, which means making it painfully obvious where your visitor needs to click in order to view your work. Whether it’s a simple text link in the menu bar of your site or a collection of thumbnail images on your home page, the idea is to help your visitors find your portfolio as quickly and easily as possible so that you can (hopefully) impress them with your work.
2. Image to Image
One of the things that frustrate me when I’m viewing the work of a fellow artist is when I have to figure out how to get to the next image in the portfolio. When you think about it, this is the worst moment to confuse or confound an Art Director. Looking at your work should be a pleasing, inspiring experience, rather than a puzzle to be solved.
That’s why it’s important for your online portfolio to have clear navigation cues, such as clickable arrows to take the visitor forward and backward within the image gallery.
One thing I’ve noticed on some portfolio websites is that the act of clicking on a thumbnail opens the image in a new window. While this allows the work to be shown by itself on a page, this can also serve to frustrate those who would rather click to the next image than close the current window and figure out which thumbnail they’d like to open next.
3. Gallery to Website
Another element that can be easily overlooked is a clear indication of how to return from your image gallery to your website. Often, online galleries function as pop-ups that overlay your site and act as their own entity. This is a great way of getting your visitor to focus on the work, but it’s also crucial to make it easy for them to get back to the main hub of your website, where they can find your bio, testimonials, list of recent work, and most importantly, your contact information.
How easy is it to navigate your portfolio website?
Just like your Illustrations themselves, it can be a good idea to reevaluate the navigation of your online portfolio. Try visiting your site through the eyes of someone who has never been there before, or ask a friend for feedback on how easy it is for them to find your work and move from here to there in your portfolio.
Special thanks to Melanie Matthews for providing the artwork for this post.
Related Posts:
- Fine-Tuning Your Portfolio Part 1 – “Skimming the Fat”
- Fine-Tuning Your Portfolio Part 2 – Consistency
- Fine-Tuning Your Portfolio Part 3 – Segmenting
- Fine-Tuning Your Portfolio Part 4 – Presentation
- 7 Elements of an Effective Portfolio Website
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Melanie, good read, I totally agree. Like a decade ago as graphic interface designers we used to create exciting and surprising navigations, that fitted the concept and content. In a way the navigation added to the experience which is great for narrative based sites. Portfolio’s do need a more functional approach to make it work for sure.
Thanks for your comment, Alrik. In my view, the navigation can be creative as long as it doesn’t distract or detract from the art.
Oeps, excuse me Thomas, I now see you wrote the article and Melanie did the illustration;)