So now that you’ve rethought your homepage, it’s time to think about your gallery. Call it what you want, a gallery, a portfolio; this is where you provide examples of your work with a few pertinent details.

Choosing your work
When I was overhauling my site, I went through all my sketchbooks – and trust me, there are a lot of them – with post-it-notes. I tagged like crazy, made lists for myself, and remembered paintings I had rolled up in the closet but really liked. Or work I’d auctioned and didn’t have anymore, but I had photos. Examine everything you have for possibilities.

I took off almost all the artwork I had already up on my site – anything I thought was out of date, or a style I don’t care to work in anymore, or I just plain was tired of.

Look at your work as a whole – choose the pieces you’re proud of, the ones that make you laugh, the ones that resonate with you. If you’ve had anything published, and you like it, by all means, choose those. If you see that you have a lot of paintings of animals, and you’d like to be known for that, group them together. If instead you look and say, “wow, I have a lot of paintings of animals, but what I really want to do is more vector work”…. Well, you get it. You should be displaying work you like, that represents you, as you’d like to be known now. Not what you did three years ago, unless that style still works for you and shows off your talent.

How to display them

Many people (myself included) show thumbnails to give a quick scan of images to choose from. How large you decide to make them, and how much you wish to show are entirely up to you.

Your thumbnails will need to open to show the full image somewhere. Decide if you want them to pop open in a new window, or appear on the same screen. (More about the “how-to” in the next part of the article.)

Consider dividing your work into sections to make it easier for viewers to find what they’re looking for. For instance: published work and personal work; illustration and editorial. If you have different styles you want to show, sectioning them off like this is helpful. For my own, I have illustrations in one section (both personal and published) and stories in another – when I had a series of illustrations that went together with words, that I felt didn’t work as well as on their own. I also had a great time displaying them in a much more creative setting that I felt helped set the tone for the theme of the pictures.

In part three: Finishing touches.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2007 at 2:45 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.