Class:MFA Illustration 2019/Week 25
Last Week
- Review your design system/solution across all of your self-promotion projects
- Share your fourth and final self-promotion project
- Brief introduction to the website assignment
This Week
- Review class website projects round 01
- Quick Adobe Bridge Demo
- Quick Squarespace/Cargo Demo
Open Questions
Notes
- The illustrator portfolio websites/examples that you shared in class (and several more) are located in my pinboard here
- pinboard.in/u:choppingblock/t:portfolio/t:illustrator
- Also, I created a list from last weeks fun conversation about your favorite museums from all over the world
- pinboard.in/u:choppingblock/t:museums-of-the-world
Use the reference guide Site Building (CMS) Solutions to identify your options for CMS website services and themes that could work for your website.
- We reviewed the illustration portfolio websites you shared as well as your new/updated website projects
- - For help with SquareSpace I have a Squarespace Best Practices for you.
- - For help with Wordpress (and themes) I have updated Wordpress Best Practices for you.
- I shared some ways to update/check the metadata in your images and batch update image files
- - I showed you how Adobe Bridge can help you to see/edit the meta information and copyright info for your images.
- - I showed you a tool called "Beter Finder Rename" (listed in Handy Utilities) can batch update file names and do fancy things like appending your name to each file.
Video Notes
Assignment
Your assignment for this week is similar to last week: You should be exploring multiple website options (Squarespace, Wix, Cargo, etc..) and/or many themes.
Few things to keep in mind:
- Do you need project galleries or lots of different images in a flat container?
- What are the most logical navigation and project list options for you?
- How well does your theme work on mobile?
- Does your website design match your personal identity (Logo, type, color and all)?
For next week your assignment is:
- If you have a website already, go look at it! What do you want to change? Does it look like the rest of your self-promotion work? Do you need to change the way you are curating or organizing your work?
- Gather up a fresh set of images that loosely represent the type of work you will have on your website.
- Study up on Cargo Collective, Adobe Portfolio, Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, and Format. You can trial all of these for free before you make them actual live websites with real domains.
- Explore the themes available to you on all these services and try TWO different explorations.
Clarification: You can try two different themes on SquareSpace, you can try one theme on Cargo Collective and one theme on Wix (for example).
Each of the options above will let you explore/test a website design and generate a custom URL that you can share with others/me for review. Some of them will also generate a preview code or password for when you want to send it to somebody for review.
Then:
- Hand in your work for the week via this web form chop.is/2Uz2DfF
- Be prepared to show your two explorations in class next week.
