Simeon Kolev 2.0

[The Godfather]

Ive re-designed the site 3 times in the last 5 weeks so. tell me how the redesign looks. I have a feeling its a keeper but artists get bored of their work really fast. Any suggestions and comments will be helpful. Thanks!

http://simeonkolev.com

 

[effowe]

Maybe it's my screen resolution, but everything looks very small. Like almost too small to read. Is this designed for 800x600? 1024x768?

 

[pontifex]

Originally posted by: effowe
Maybe it's my screen resolution, but everything looks very small. Like almost too small to read. Is this designed for 800x600? 1024x768?

yeah, way too tiny at 1680x1050

 

[The Godfather]

web standards now days are width: 940-970px. Mine is 1000px. I belive its designed for 1280.

 

[effowe]

I am on 1620x1200 and it was way too small. Can't you scale the site dependant upon the current browser width?

 

[Chronoshock]

The page fits in a 800x600 viewport, so it doesn't look like you designed it for 1000px, or at least you factored in way too much horizontal padding.
I would also suggest a bigger default view or a fluid width. If this is supposed to be showing off artwork, then show the art, 30px square thumbnails won't do.

Overriding the right click functionality is a no-no in my book. Users should always be allowed to use the default context menu (I'm guessing this is just an overly sensitive mouse event listener on the thumnails)

Font size needs to be bigger, bump up all font to a minimum of 11px

Find a color scheme and stick with it, go with a primary palette of 3-5 colors and stick with it. Try to give your colors a semantic association (ex: headers or callouts get one set of colors, informational text and their bounding boxes get another). I see black, brown, blue, orange, yellow, green, and magenta. Even web 2.0-ish sites that use bright colors try to coordinate them.

Follow the Gestalt principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology) in arranging your UI components. Use white space and alignment to facilitate functional grouping. The contact info on the left hand side should be left aligned, the icons should be aligned, the text "email" and the phone number should also be aligned. There should be white space between the Design/Consult/etc. icons on the right and their associated text.

Color contrast should also be considered. Gray on black is hard for users to read. Also remember that color contrast must vary both hue and brightness, pure white on bright yellow/orange is another hard to read area. Finally, a saturated red/blue combination is another UI issue. Due to an effect known as chromatic aberration, it's difficult for the eye to focus on those two frequencies simultaneously.

Make 2d and 3d larger and act as sub headings, right now they're barely readable

Find better images for your awards, they are also hard to read (I can't even tell who awarded them). If the reader doesn't know what the award is, then there's no point in showing it.

 

[Safeway]

By the way, you need to do the CommentsWin drawing.

Edit, nevermind. It is midnight today. I got confused.

 

[Aluvus]

It's very pretty. Now I'm going to say mean things about it.

You should be sizing fonts in em or %, not px. My monitor is not your monitor, my browser is not your browser.

And the bottom line is that your text is really small. It's just barely readable on one of my systems, and painful to read on the other. I know that tiny fonts have become popular among web design types, because they look pretty at a macro level, but they are tremendously unpleasant to read. Text exists to be read.

You also need more contrast for the text color. Again, looks pretty but I can't read it.

I'm not clear on why your name on the couch is a link to the home page. There don't seem to be any other pages, unless you intend to add some later, so the link serves no purpose. Also it is counter-intuitive for the name to be a link and the rest of the couch not to be.

If you're going to push your awards, you need to provide more context. As someone that isn't a professional web designer (much like your potential clients), I am not going to recognize these awards from tiny images with reduced saturation. They could be extremely prestigious, or given out by your mom; I have no way of knowing. I actually can't even count them for sure. Even just making them separate images and using alt text to indicate what they are would be a step up.

 

[The Godfather]

Originally posted by: Chronoshock
The page fits in a 800x600 viewport, so it doesn't look like you designed it for 1000px, or at least you factored in way too much horizontal padding.
I would also suggest a bigger default view or a fluid width. If this is supposed to be showing off artwork, then show the art, 30px square thumbnails won't do.

Overriding the right click functionality is a no-no in my book. Users should always be allowed to use the default context menu (I'm guessing this is just an overly sensitive mouse event listener on the thumnails)

Font size needs to be bigger, bump up all font to a minimum of 11px

Find a color scheme and stick with it, go with a primary palette of 3-5 colors and stick with it. Try to give your colors a semantic association (ex: headers or callouts get one set of colors, informational text and their bounding boxes get another). I see black, brown, blue, orange, yellow, green, and magenta. Even web 2.0-ish sites that use bright colors try to coordinate them.

Follow the Gestalt principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology) in arranging your UI components. Use white space and alignment to facilitate functional grouping. The contact info on the left hand side should be left aligned, the icons should be aligned, the text "email" and the phone number should also be aligned. There should be white space between the Design/Consult/etc. icons on the right and their associated text.

Color contrast should also be considered. Gray on black is hard for users to read. Also remember that color contrast must vary both hue and brightness, pure white on bright yellow/orange is another hard to read area. Finally, a saturated red/blue combination is another UI issue. Due to an effect known as chromatic aberration, it's difficult for the eye to focus on those two frequencies simultaneously.

Make 2d and 3d larger and act as sub headings, right now they're barely readable

Find better images for your awards, they are also hard to read (I can't even tell who awarded them). If the reader doesn't know what the award is, then there's no point in showing it.

Omg. Actually I appreciate posts like these.

The font is 11px for body text and 11+ for headings. Overall the colors are made to be creative and look pretty because this is an artist's portfolio, not really a "corporate, minimalistic" website where I would be managing to a 3 color scheme. But you are right in all of your suggestions and I will take them in to account and work on it some more based on what you said.

It's very pretty. Now I'm going to say mean things about it. You should be sizing fonts in em or %, not px. My monitor is not your monitor, my browser is not your browser. And the bottom line is that your text is really small. It's just barely readable on one of my systems, and painful to read on the other. I know that tiny fonts have become popular among web design types, because they look pretty at a macro level, but they are tremendously unpleasant to read. Text exists to be read. You also need more contrast for the text color. Again, looks pretty but I can't read it. I'm not clear on why your name on the couch is a link to the home page. There don't seem to be any other pages, unless you intend to add some later, so the link serves no purpose. Also it is counter-intuitive for the name to be a link and the rest of the couch not to be. If you're going to push your awards, you need to provide more context. As someone that isn't a professional web designer (much like your potential clients), I am not going to recognize these awards from tiny images with reduced saturation. They could be extremely prestigious, or given out by your mom; I have no way of knowing. I actually can't even count them for sure. Even just making them separate images and using alt text to indicate what they are would be a step up.

I try to avoid the % since Ive had troubles with it in the past, but now that you make a note of it, I might switch over to that principle. I'm on a 1280 res monitor, and it looks perfect, however luckily I saved the larger version of the psd. My old design had pages and I find them useless since people want to see what youre about and how to reach you without having to leave the page or look for the nav. Plus again, this is a very simple site, aimed to be attractive and useful. I must say youre right about the awards, and I will emphasize them.

Overall I will rethink it and possibly make it larger and make it resolution compatible.

Thank you.

I think the suggestions so far should be enough for me to work on. Hopefully I'll get on it soon and update. Thanks again.

edit: Took out the couch link. Also took a look at the wiki page (take off the parenthases) and it is quite interesting. But as I said this is a very simple site.