Computer Arts Projects: Hydro74 website
This March I was asked by Computer Arts to participate in their Design Challenge in the Computer Arts Projects magazine. The challenge was to design a blogish portfolio website for Orlando based designer and illustrator Joshua M. Smith. Josh does excellent detailed illustrative work so accepting the challenge was a no-brainer.
When I first browsed through Joshua’s work, I really just wanted to do a simple full screen flash site showcasing the amazingly vivid and detailed illustrations that Joshua does. But from the brief it seemed that Joshua was looking for something else, so I took the challenge of making a blog-style portfolio work.
However I was still keen on having at least one large piece of work at the top of the front page, so I decided to feature a recent or prominent piece here. I added an info box with a short project description, controls for an image slideshow (I’m thinking a combination of close crops, overview images and images that show the work in context) and some social media buttons making it easy to share the featured content.
To add some fun to the browsing experience, I chose to have a sorting mechanism on the front page directly underneath the large feature in stead of a traditional category navigation. By clicking the tags in the sorting mechanism, the teasers will update on the fly. The list of teasers will expand as much as needed, making the page shorter/longer.
As a simple way of customizing the browsing experience, the user also has the opportunity to chose between two different views: Columns of 3 teasers of work or a more traditional blog view with wide images on top of each other.
At the bottom of the page I added quite a traditional footer where the user will always be able to find a short bio, a feed from Twitter and a random Hydro74 typeface with a link to the font store.
Today the Hydro74 site is almost copy free. I think it would be much easier for most users (especially potential clients) to appreciate the greatness of Joshua’s work if it is accompanied by descriptions of the project, the process, the background story, the context, etc. – anything that can put the work into perspective. By adding short descriptions on the front page teasers and some more thorough ones on the portfolio pages, Joshua’s incredible collection of work will come off as being much more impressive.
Design-wise I wanted to keep things really simple. A black/white/”gold” color scheme and fonts that aren’t too attention grabbing, seemed to be the best match to most of Joshua’s work.
From Joshuas brief: The goal is to develop a clean professional looking site that is not overly complex, but with a few embellishments to keep it concurrent with various web trends. I’ve been highly inspired by various hype blogs and their structures as well as various designers on how they structure their website for easy to view work.
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