layout for my portfolio/services site

i'm having trouble getting valid feedback from my oh so wonderful friends, so now i find myself signing up at yet another forum to seek the artristic critique of others.

so far i have this much: http://www.lucidia.org/ideas/gearconceptlayout.jpg

on the actual working psd i've moved the site URL over to above the content box area, and gotten rid of the glossy button thing with the arrow, as it was rather pointless to begin with.

i am considering adding some more mech stuff on the right side and making that the navigation area, or perhaps making it a spotlight area for new portfolio peices or templates for sale or something.

it's suppose to be professional but i can't just make it boring or look like a million other sites. the world has too many supposed "web designers" anyway, so i'm trying to at least be creative and at least a little bit unique (which i'm probably failing at miserably since i know for sure people have done what i'm doing a million times over and probably better).

anything you can say is good. negative or positive it all helps.

Looks great to me. I'd love to see how you do your nav. As soon as I saw it I thought it'd be cool to have your site in flash maybe...and gears could move to raise/lower different screens when you click on different nav buttons. I agree that the glossy button thing needed to go, and I suppose it wouldn't hurt to have a little more activity on the right, as long as it turns out well :p . Keep it up and show us the next update of it.

Oh, and welcome to the forums


(BTW, link needs to be copy/pasted to work, at least for me...might want to edit that note into your post...)

i am considering adding some more mech stuff on the right side

Id probably advise against that. You dont really want to over do it and there are plenty of meched-out sites out there. What i would do is add more "blueprints" to the layout. Make some more gear pics (like the ones in white..or any blueprint shape you want) and scatter them over the blue BG. Add more images so they "surround" your box in a way. Cause right now the site is very weighted to the left...so this would create a little balance which is important.

making that the navigation area

That i would advise against also. Because you have so many vertical graphics...a horizontal nav would break up the space and create "flow" (so a visitors eyes go "around" your page..not just up/down your page) See where your mech graphic meets the top of your box (the box in the middle of the page)....right to the right of that is a perfect place so your nav is sitting (not actually..maybe 5 pixels above or something) on that box.

Id probably ditch the orb thingy. That is an easy effect and doesnt come off as professional. Instead...instert your logo there...or name or whichever.


You also have plenty of space underneath...id add another box. Maybe an affiliate section...or even a "client login" if you need one of those.

You may want to bring up the opacity of your box. Cause once you get content...it may be hard to read over that wire thing (especially if you use black text...which is almost a given)

Also you may want to incorperate that box into the design becasue the design is very organic in shape. You could add a thick border around it. Like look at my signature (intellisig). See how on top it is straight....then curves up to form that bump thing...a shape like that (like my signature cut in half) as a border for the box may look interesting. You could also attach some wires to the box or something. Just so the box and the design dont become 2 different elements.

Hopefully some of that is helpful. Or at least it gets your mind going. Even though i wrote an entire book here ....its not a bad design. Just keep going with it! and yes...welcome to the forum!

http://www.lucidia.org/ideas/gearlayoutmaster.jpg

phase 2, moving forward, trying to get this damn concept put together right. something is still very wrong. someone tell me what it is. i tried to make the text kinda fade from mechy to liney, but it looked bad, so then i just made "services" liney, but it still looks wrong. maybe all liney? or all mech? or something else?

jebus, i just want to finish this. taking too long. lol but i suppose good things take time.

I like the second one alot ;) Just so you know on the bottom left of the box on the second page, on the outside it's a bit jaggedy.

I'm also not sure I like a pixel text with the style of the rest of your page, but I'm not an expert on this stuff ;)

I think that looks really awesome... the texture in those gears and stuff looks great, my only suggestion woudl be to make the content area bigger, because right now there isnt much space for stuff to go.

Other then that though I think it looks pretty good

Originally posted by lucidia
http://www.lucidia.org/ideas/gearlayoutmaster.jpg

phase 2, moving forward, trying to get this damn concept put together right. something is still very wrong. someone tell me what it is. i tried to make the text kinda fade from mechy to liney, but it looked bad, so then i just made "services" liney, but it still looks wrong. maybe all liney? or all mech? or something else?

jebus, i just want to finish this. taking too long. lol but i suppose good things take time.

Perfect as is.

One question though: where will the navigation go?

about the font: well i dunno i love that font and i've been abusing it, i'll admit. it looks best small, but i dunno i like the blocky pixel effect when it's big too. but something about the way the title looks, it bugs me. so i dunno yet.... i think mostly the way lack of transitition between the mech texture and the lines, but i tried to leave a gradient in there but it looks pretty bad for some reason, at least in my opinion.

oh yeah, navigation, yup i havent' forgotten i just don't know how this is balanced out yet. i'm afraid to make it too side heavy, which technically is already is side heavy. well thanks for the continued support and critique, i will have further progress soon (and then maybe i'll have time to look more deeply into the other work on this forum, cause i see a lot of really awesome talent, just not enough time to say much about it, but that will change)

it would be good as it is I think phase 2 whatever, seems everyone likes the design so do I, I dont really know about the fonts of the title, or if the content area is going to extent or you just slap a layer on there and make it look like that, still, it looks great to me, I like the background texture and gear things, it would be really cool if you make some animation (ex. flash stuff) with it

i dont' have flash and until i'm rich i probably won't since every other avenue i've tried to aquirre a copy of flash through hasn't worked. i used to have flash back in the day. the last flash thing i did was this HORRID intro for http://www.transformatorium.com and that's the extent of my flashiness. i'm sure i'd get pretty good with it, if i actually had it. i've had some people offer to do flash for this project, but it's MY project so i'd feel pretty stupid offering myself out as a designer, but oh, i didn't design my site. etc. but yeah i agree some animation would rock, i just don't have the resources right now. but there will always be the future.

as far as the layout goes, i'm gonna use iframes. people hate them, yes, but they are less crappy than regular frames, and they don't have as many browser compat issues as scrolling layers (i had major issues with my last lucidia.org layout, whereas many of my mac using and nonIE using friends couldn't view things correctly, things were out of alignement, etc), or at least that's what was fed back to me through the beta testers. haven't had any complaints since i got the iframe layout set up. so now i'm going through some kind of iframe phase. personally i think i'ts great cause it keeps the load time down (even cached, my last lucidia.org layout had a lot of complaints because it was maybe... 85 or 90k, so it took "a few seconds" to "refresh". i hate this instant gratification world sometimes. ).