A chalk mural I did for Juniper Park. Additional description of the project’s details are on Vimeo.

Online Portfolios /// Resources. Ben Weeks RGD Headstart talk 2011.

Here are some resources I put together for a talk I’m doing tomorrow morning at a career development conference for design students called Headstart. 

You can buy your own dot-com address for $5 at mediatemple.com which is also a great place to host your site. If you’d like a .ca domain name, try 10dollar.ca

Next step is to get an FTP program to transfer files to the webserver (the computer you are renting from your hosting company that is connected to your domain name-where your website will be stored.) My favourite is Transmit.

If you don’t have time for that and just want your work posted online quickly but have it be well presented, checkout Krop or Behance. Here’s my page on Krop, my wife has her interior design portfolio there too. And here’s my page on Behance. 

There are of course other platforms you can try playing with. Bruce Mau Design and others use Cargo. While others still prefer customized iterations of Wordpress or Expression Engine. This wordpress theme was designed on a grid by Khoi Vinh-former Design Director of Nytimes.com. Khoi also recently wrote the book, “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” his blog too is one of the most enlightening and thoughtfully written live journals on the topic.

I’ve been looking at Cargo and admire what Marian Bantjes has done with Expression Engine. At the moment though, my main portfolio site is a personalized version of Indexhibit. It’s flexible and like the others a good content management system that tracks stats to some degree. Here are the installation instructions for indexhibit if you have a host and domain already.

I’m going to get all futuristic on you in a second. But first I’m going to go oldschool. Before Typekit, html would only show pretty much raw text with very limited font choices. I remember one designer’s carefully selected typeface pairing of Slate and Mercury for an identity sadly had to be Arial and Times on the web because of those technical limitations. 

Even making a site in the past, the designer could use nice fonts only in images, but not as selectable body copy (Raw text is better for the internet: for users copying, pasting and for visibility to search engines.) So imagine a site with many, many pages and someone wants you to essentially change the style sheets, you’d have to modify all your photoshop documents, resave and reupload each exported image-it would take forever. 

Now with CSS, type can be controlled from a text file, the parameters can be defined through code. So now one can erase helvetica and put Times in its place within CSS to populate a whole website with the change instantly. Typekit uses CSS to let designers use an ever growing number of well designed fonts *as selectable text* so they look good but can still be seen by google. 

If you play with TypeKit, just make sure you test your site on a PC and on different browsers. I’ve seen a site using typekit work well on safari but glitch like crazy in firefox. So test your site. And remember, if you use typekit, you likely won’t have the same refined controls for kerning that indesign offers. So some of the details may not be quite as nice as you’d like.  BUT, it’s worth playing with and testing! It will continue to improve. 

Ok that’s a bit of futuristic-ness. Now for the next level, via one of my favourite sites for inspiration Swiss Miss comes this fine looking thing, an ipad porfolio app.

To learn more web stuff checkout the Flash in the Can Conference happening on May 2-4. It’s global and is run by Canadian people. Here’s a 10% off discount code because I’m your friend: designedgepe

If you’re more into books, these have a great buzz about them and have titles like, “HTML5 for Web Designers,” and, “The Elements of Content Strategy.” And for those into actionscript, this book by the legendary Colin Moock is a must.

Well, I hope that helps you if you’re looking to setup an online portfolio or improve your webdesign skills without getting a computer science degree. 

A special thanks goes to my friend Daniel Pagan who has helped me a great deal in this area over the years. Thanks are due also to Daniel Robbins of Corus Entertainment and David Gillis of Teehan+Lax for joining me and to RGD ontario for inviting me!

*Added April 28, 2011: Other portfolio platforms:

Dripbook, Squarespace

Peter Buchanan-Smith talks about axes, graphic design for Wilco, New York Times, Philip Glass, Maria Kalman as well as the wonder of canoe trips in the Canadian wilderness.

rteixeira:

brocatus:

Covers for the complete works of Samuel Beckett by London based A2/SW/HK

bmdesign:

Michael Bierut on Clients: Observer Media: Design Observer

Appreciate the work of Sam Potts.

The Art of Hermann Zapf. (Thanks: Marion Deuchars)

Great interview with Jessica Rose about the redesign of Toronto Life Magazine.

Here’s some CD packaging I did for Laila Biali’s new album, “Tracing Light.” Here’s a sample track.

Here’s a full page illustration I did for Bloomberg Business Week for an article called “What is a sophisticated investor?” (It’s in the issue with Obama and oil on the cover.)

Underline / Ben Weeks Poster featured on RGD site.

http://www.rgdontario.com/contentmanager/ViewObject.aspx?sys-Portal=38&sys-Class=Item&sys-ID=509

feltron:

From a recent Qantas flight… so comforting.