New webpage

[E.M.GIST]

I posted for the first time a little while back and someone asked about my website. At the time I was working on one, it is now up and running. If you are curious check it out at
www.erikgist.com
I would greatly appreciate any and all input about the design, flow, artwork, or whatever.

[OneBigCelt]

Great stuff man you got a neat style and your website matches it

[cityworker]

Erik - The website looks great, I see you finished that illustration that you were working on in The LOTR class. How do you feel about the end result? Looks good to me.

-Chris

[Blackhawk]

Nice website. Your page titles are messed up though, some say Adobe Golive 4, other's don't match their section, and some just give the address. Also, on my 1600x1200 screen, the background tiles a bit, so it confused me when I first entered the site. I didn't think to put my cursor over the text at the top, I thought something would load in the center.

But your artwork is beautiful, gah. Your lifedrawing stuff is amazing.

[Dakardaur]

nice site!
btw...is the fuzzyniess and all the backgroun movement supposed to be there?
Makin me dizzy..

[E.M.GIST]

Thanks guys, I appreciate the input.
OneBigCelt:thanks
cityworker:thanks, and yes I am reasonably happy
Blackhawk:Thats the kind of input I am looking for, thank you
Dakardaur:Yeah it is on purpose, and the uncomfortable feeling is why I kept it only on the front page

[Deth Jester]

great stuff... gotta get more up there on your site! such an inspiration! :)

cant wait to see what you have next in store for us..

-mike

[pandawhipped]

Erik, i really like the style you have on your opening page. It has a very "Seven" feel to it. I think the blur and upward jump is a little too much though. It makes me want to hurry up and move on, cause its a bit too disorienting. Some people will be turned off by this and may very well think the whole site will be like this. You don't want people clicking the back button before they've even begun to explore.

Having the links on the top of the page blurry makes it a bit of a chore to navigate (ie not knowing what i'm clicking on until i roll over it). This is known as mystery meat navigation, and is a big no no in web design. I understand it was a stylistic choice, but believe me, there are plenty of people out there who will have no idea those are supposed to be links, thus never seeing the meat of your site.

One thing I am a stickler for are sites that don't work properly at 800 by 600 screen resolution. I know...its ridiculous that people would actually use it anymore, but they do. Especially people who need to hire artists...they usually do nothing more than word processing and web surfing on their computers and see no reason to have any higher resolution (or dont even know what that means). Your home page is too small to fit in an 800 by 600 box, so some of your roll over images arent showing up. Also, for some reason you put the content in a frame, but without any scrollbars. At a small screen resolution you can only see one and a half rows of images. If you end up eventually having more than 2 on any of your pages, they won't be visible, and there is no indication of a need to scroll down. I would suggest taking that frame out altogether and just sticking it on the same page as your header.

btw i just checked again, and its not just that frame that doesnt have any scrollbars. your whole site doesnt have any (except the front page). Even if you shrink the window to be really small.

The left arrow on the joker picture brings you to skully.htm instead of dknight.htm

I suggest taking out the big title text on your subpages. Instead, just have the menu link be a different color for the respective page. Usually having it be in its rollover state works just fine. Right now it just looks like its there to take up space. The other reason for having the menu link in its rollover state is that if i want to go to a new page i'm not sure which one of those links im on right now, so i have to actually think...most people dont want to have to take time to browse webpages. Everything needs to be VERY fast and ready to go right NOW. You want people to spend time looking at your art, not figuring out how to get to it ;)

I think having your updates on the front page instead of the last menu choice would be better. This way as soon as people go to your page they can see whats been updated. And instead of just saying "i updated the life drawing section", put a link directly to it. It might be hard to put it on the front with your current front page design, so maybe just leave it where it is, but put the links in there like i mentioned for sure.

If any of this doesn't make sense, ask me in class.

Now, I was critiquing this from the point of view of a prospective employer looking to hire an illustrator. If this is just a site for you to show family and friends your work, then keep it however you want. Its your personal site. But if this is a means to aquire work, please atleast consider what i suggested.

-ryan

[c0g]

Yeah, get rid of the background blur and jomp. Makes me want to throw up. You have some awsome stuff on your site and you should make people feel comfortable enough to stick around and look at it.