/Graphics/ Build a photo portfolio, part 1
28/10/2008 | Filed under Develop > Graphics
Use an online portfolio to showcase your best work. Elliot Jay Stocks shows you how to design a striking photography website for maximum impact
There was a day when putting photos on a website was somewhat ill-advised, with users having to cope with abysmally slow download speeds and a generally poor viewing experience, thanks to the limited colour palette on old monitors. Not only that – uploading your photos meant having to host them yourself on a relatively slow server.
But those days are long gone. Not only do graphics files now feature prominently on the web, they’re also readily available from online stock photography sites. There’s never been a better time to combine photography and the web, be it for increased visual impact or building a good old-fashioned portfolio.
In this tutorial, we’ll create a design for an online portfolio and achieve maximum impact by using very big, bold photography. This will be combined with a thumbnail system for browsing the portfolio, and you’ll also learn how to keep text legible in spite of all this rich imagery. Using semi-transparent blocks, we’ll strike a balance between usability and visual impact – a way of working that you can apply to almost any design project. We’ll design the visuals in Photoshop, ready to turn them into a website in the next tutorial.
About the author:
Name: Elliot Jay Stocks
Site: elliotjaystocks.com
Areas of expertise: Design, CSS, web standards, Photoshop
Clients: Future of Web Design
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Click here to download the support files
Click here to download tutorial PDF
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