portfolio

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1 comment, last by Radikalizm 12 years, 4 months ago
Hello everyone,

I built a portfolio and I would like everyone to take a quick look (if you can) and tell me what you think, this is for an internship as well as my capstone class at the college I'm going to.

any and all feedback is appreciated.

thanks.

http://micah-hawman.com/
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I'll spew some feedback as I browse the site :)

Black on dark green is hard to read. Notably at the bottom of the gradient.

Was unable to reach the third level menu entries. Menu closes before my mouse could get there. Using Chrome on Windows 7.

Resume lacks formatting which made it hard to skim through.
Your objective doesn't seem to align with the skills shown in your resume. It came across as very focused towards a programmer position rather than a level design position.
Resume overall is quite lengthy. Try looking up a few examples and cut it down to something more professional and straight to the point.
Bullet points are great, but not when they're followed by long sentences (in your experience section).

Your portfolio seems to contain work from 2 distinct professions; programmer and artist.
But there doesn't seem to be any examples that show experience in level design, which I gathered is what you're aiming for.
The centered text is a bit annoying to read, there's also again the general lack of formatting. Using bold and headings at appropriate places makes it much easier to read and skim.
It's especially important people can skim the site, they won't be going through all the pages.

I would suggest restructuring the portfolio section a bit.
Instead of navigating from the menu, create a single overview page that contains the name and 1 screenshot of every project you're showcasing.
Link these to more detailed project pages. This would allow the viewer to get an overview in 1 glance.

The work displayed in the Photoshop section is quite bad.
You don't want to display that level of quality. It's better to have quality over quantity in a portfolio.

Overall there are way too many mentions of your work being part of the school's assignments.
Don't do this. It doesn't come across positively if almost all your projects are mentioned as school assignments.
This will imply you don't do anything beyond your coursework.

You'll want to gear your portfolio much clearer towards the position you're applying for.

For reference, www.vhabion.net got me into Funcom last year.
Note how on the projects page you can scroll through the page once to get a general overview of what I've done.
You can narrow it down a bit further to see my accomplishments in group projects by just reading the headings.
Finally, if you're really interested you can read the actual text.
Though, I also committed the sin of including content that shouldn't be there.
The next time I send it to a prospective employer I'll definitely drop the sites section.
Remco van Oosterhout, game programmer.
My posts are my own and don't reflect the opinion of my employer.
You should rethink the entire design of your page, the current look has a lot of common beginner mistakes like bad color usage, bad formatting, bad outlining, and horrible readability (black-green gradients with black text and blue hyperlinks just do not work). Overall it just does not come over as professional, and the occasional spelling/grammatical errors only add to that. If you're having trouble designing something yourself, maybe try to hire someone to make a design for you or use something like drupal to set up your page, and please read over the text you put online a couple of times before publishing it.

I can confirm that the menu is broken, like the previous poster mentioned

Content-wise you should try to focus on the skills you're best at. Not trying to be rude here, but your concept art and photoshop skills are not really all that great; you seem to have some problems working with perspectives in your drawings, appropriate color selection, shading, character posing and material/tool selection for doing your art. You should also try to present cleaned up work in your portfolio without any obvious eraser marks or blotches

As the previous poster also mentioned, do not just add too much academic work you did to your portfolio. Work you made at school for a final project or for larges assignments are ok, but these look like they were smaller assignments given throughout the year. Show possible employers what you can manage to complete as a personal project, maybe even with a team. Post a demo of your work once in a while as to prove that you can actually produce something fun and playable, as this will increase your chances a lot.

Talking about the problems you faced while doing certain projects is great, but please also briefly tell how you handled those problems as to show that you can actually do problem-solving work (a skill that is extremely valuable in almost any profession). Only try to add actual exceptional or interesting problems to these lists, mentioning your ability to do testing and debugging does not seem appropriate since these are assumed to be very elementary skills which all developers have.

Keep working on it and keep refining it, and you'll be ok

Good luck :)

I gets all your texture budgets!

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