a resource for the student of art and graphic design
Customize your Portfolio Website
Be sure to Title the name of your site using your real name.
Create a slogan or tagline that is more specific phrase suited to your work as an artist/designer. This may be a complete sentence, a short phrase or simply 2–3 single words. Whatever version it is, make this tagline something that distinguishes you from other designers or artists. Your artist statement and biography should be very helpful to you when writing this. Each of these is related to the other in trying to put into words your philosophy as an artist. If the Artist biography is the longest than the tagline is the shortest version.
Your Splash page or welcome Home page should be rather simple. It remains the same all the time but offers options or choices to the content.
If you create a specific image for the header on your site, you must prepare this image beforehand according to resolution and size specs. Resolution should be 100 ppi and size 1000 pixels wide by 288 pixels high. Use PhotoShop or similar image editing software to resize and crop an image to these specifications. From the PhotoShop top menu bar>>Image>>Canvas Size to increase the blank area around your image without scaling the image itself. Menu Bar>>Image>>Image Size to scale the image itself. Use the cropping tool from the main tool box to crop the image itself.
If you create a custom background image or color, select a custom color by entering the hexidecimal code or picking from the color wheel. If you want to match a color from an image use the eyedropper tool from PhotoShop, sample the color from an image opened in PhotoShop and then copy down it’s number code.
Caption AND Describe your work. Each image should have both unless you have several images from a series or different images from the same piece of work. Then, you might have one description for the group but separate captions for each one, individually. This includes the images from your weekly sketchbook exercises.
Think carefully about how you group/organize your work. The most obvious way that you will influence this is how you title and arrange the category tabs. Categories are a separate option for organizing information. If you want to see information organized you must create a set of categories (tabs) first, then add the items you wish seen beneath each of those categories/tabs.
Image correct pictures of your artwork using Photoshop before importing to your website. This is a basic and very easy three step process even if you are unfamiliar with Photoshop at this point. Specific instructions can be found here>> Image Correction
