My website started out around 1999 as a personal site. I was learning HTML at work and wanted to try out new ideas on my own terms. I had redesigned the site a few times, but always kept the content intact. Fast-forward to this past summer, when I rethought the whole darn thing. I realized that what I really wanted to do was to change the direction and focus of the site and make it more of a showcase for my illustration work. I recently took a CSS class through Sessions.edu and used it, along with the practical work knowledge from my job, to overhaul my 8-year-old website. Since then, I’ve been a finalist in the Bloggies for Best-Designed Weblog and a Blog of Note on Blogger.com.

What I’ll be writing about in the next few installments is how to showcase your illustrations on your site. This could of course be applicable to photography or design too, but I think illustration has its own set of unique issues. Plus, I’m biased.

Initial impressions are key. The homepage is usually the first thing anyone will see when they visit your site. You want to set the tone for what people can expect to see inside. In many cases, a splash screen does the trick. Ordinarily, I dislike splash screens, but as you want to showcase your illustration style first and maybe your design and coding skills inside, an attention-grabbing graphic sets the mood well.

This is the way my homepage looked before:

And the way it looks now.

Which one looks like it belongs to an illustrator?

Coming next… Setting up your gallery.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 2:10 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.