Need a critique of my website

[Truk]

Kurt Kindermann’s art portfolio

Hi– with the exception of a little code problem needing resolution I feel like my art portfolio website is ready to be thrown your way for a critique. I’d love to hear your opinions on the functionality/looks/usability of the site.

[MBM]

The mouse over effect on this page is great :

http://www.kurtkindermann.com/pap.html

And I like “#7 Woman”.

Are you using thumbnails or resizing the images with a class? Some of the images took a few seconds to draw.

Instead of a blank background why not try to replicate a gallery wall and use light textured wallpaper?

I don’t like the font.

Enlarging images to a fixed positions looks sloppy. Why not use animations to make everything smoother? It’s a lot easier than it sounds. Take a look at the fade effects here :

https://daneden.me/animate/

You could use a contact form instead of a link to your email address. I’ve got a form and sendmail script that is marked up so easy to adapt.

[Laron123]

Before I begin I have to say,

Wow! You’re really talented. I like the shoe series and the sculptures. I can see the Robert Rauschenberg influence, but you’ve certainly crafted your own style.

As far as the site, I would try to create better contrast between the font color and background, possibly increasing the size. Also, play around with the spacing of items on your pages. For example, I thought the shoe series was the last group in “Mixed Media” by the way your work is arranged. I sort of discovered “Figure Deconstruction 3” after accidently scrolling.

The “Home” and “Contact” links at the bottom I would remove because you already have them up top.

I agree with MBM on the contact page. You should use a contact form instead of forcing visitors to open their local email. There are plenty of templates out there you could use. But I don’t think you should try to do anything with the background as far as texturing. The complexity in your work is the focus, not the wall. And honestly, leaving it blank gives it the gallery feel MBM mentioned.

Take care.

[Truk]

Laron & MBM– Thanks for the feedback and compliments!

• fan – here’s a link to where I got the card fan code. I believe it can be used to fan out several images (more than the 3 it does in the example, it just needs some twiddling and a :nth child() selector).

• images – I’m resizing the images to 100% of the parent div. I chose to do that because it’s half the graphics that thumbnails would be. I’ll look into streamlining them somehow -maybe thumbnails for pics with the “fan” effect as that seems to be the biggest slow down. I’d also like to get some better photographs, but a bunch of that work has sold, now I’m stuck with what I have.

So far as spacing is concerned, since it’s a floating box layout, it’s going to be divided up by your screen width. I had to do fixed (pixel) widths for the parent divs of which there are 5 or 6 different ones to accommodate for differently proportioned pieces.

I’m not hot on the fixed positioning of the expanded images either. Right now I’m looking for a javascript replacement and I’ll check out the link MBM gave me. I had an ease on it before, but the images were blowing up to 100% of the screen then shrinking down to my specified size so I went with instant. I’d also like the image info (the text under) to expand with the image, but I haven’t figured that one out yet.. maybe with Js!

• font/background – I think I need to enlarge the font for under each image– background… I don’t want to distract from the images as the whole purpose of the site is to showcase them. I considered a really subtle texture, but I don’t want the pages to look like an apple app.

• contact/bottom menu – I agree with both of you, I don’t like invasion into my email programs and that needs to be fixed. MBM– if you have something already made up I’d love to see it. I have little experience with forms. – bottom menu- There is only one page that really requires scrolling and it’s not that much. Since I’ve found that menu to stick sometimes maybe it’s worth just getting rid of it if you feel it’s superfluous.

• art/misc – RR was an early influence, so were Jasper Johns and the German expressionists. I’ve also been into Egon Schiele and Picasso over the years. Right now I’m trying my best to come up with my own thing, but I guess you can’t wash away every influence!

I’m back to web design after a very long break– I got into it early (when AOL first offered the www) and was pretty masterful with basic html (yes, I coded EVERYTHING into tables), but then flash came along and I lost interest for years. Css has been fun/brain frying to learn. I’ve enjoyed the challenge but really need this site on its feet by mid Feb.

KK

[MBM]

Here’s a contact form, the css and sendmail files. The fieldnames correspond so you should be able to edit to suit. Scroll to the bottom of the css file and you’ll understand what values you need to change. Download the javascript libraries, google their names and they’ll come up. You only need them if you want to use the datepicker.

You upload the contact.php and sendmail.php files to your server and you’re good to go.

https://gist.github.com/gyprosetti/1f44d79a9fbb0e640d29

https://gist.github.com/gyprosetti/25c2486d67c14eae8169

https://gist.github.com/gyprosetti/ca71472014cf5f5ba973

A friend of mine designed a website for an artist :

http://carolinehudson.com/

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