You’ve redone your homepage, chosen artwork you’d like to show, and decided how you’d like to display it. Now comes the grunt work – getting it all done.

Coding it yourself
In a perfect world, you would code everything on your site yourself. It’s frustrating at times, but ultimately very satisfying when you can tell a prospective employer that you did everything they see on your site.

Look at other sites for inspiration. If you like how a site looks, study the code to see how they did something, but don’t steal it! (You wouldn’t want someone stealing your work to use on their site, right? Same thing.) A little research can show you different ideas you might never have thought of and may start you off on a new and exciting approach to your portfolio.

Don’t be afraid to use Google – type in “code for thumbnails to open on same page” (without the quotes) and see what comes up. There are tons of websites devoted to explaining just the bit of code you’ll need to make your site stand out – you just have to do a little searching.

Using a package
I’m assuming you would be hosting all this on your own website, but in case you aren’t, here are outside links (some of which charge a fee) who do it for you:

• Photoshop has a Web Photo Gallery option which I haven’t fully explored, since I did mine from scratch, but it looks like a quick and effective way to get the job done quickly.
• Impact Folios
• My Expose
• All Trade Art

Asking for help
Ask a talented friend to trade work with you! If you know a great coder, see if she’ll help you with your page in exchange for an illustration or design for their website. Most people are only too happy to check out your code when you get stuck.

If you have a painting that’s too big to scan, a friend who’s a good photographer can take a great picture of it for you. Then you can help him with his portfolio site, or make prints of a favorite painting for him.

Get the word out!
Don’t forget when you’re finished to show off what you’ve done – tell your mailing list, if you have one, past employers and teachers, or places that have hired you previously that they can now view your work all in one place. It just might lead to a new job!

Read Elena’s previous post

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Design, Design Careers, Illustration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.