Andy Mangold

As a young designer, my web presence is an important aspect of my personal branding, my best method of marketing myself, and a strong reflection of the designer I am, or want to be. Since I started putting my work online three years ago, this domain has had six different designs, only three of which I am not completely ashamed of (a good sign I am growing as a designer). Keeping to my unintentionally established six-month website life cycle, I will be redesigning my portfolio and blog for launch sometime in early 2010.

I have been spending the last couple months accumulating bookmarks of portfolio and blog designs that I find to be highly effective, compelling, or interesting for any reason, and I thought I would share my thoughts. These are some of the best websites out there in the portfolio/blogosphere, in my humble opinion.

Jez Burrows

Jez Burrows’ recently redesigned site has been getting around a lot lately; and for good reason. His simply designed portfolio immediately gives you a sense of his body of work & personal style. His homepage makes prominent use of the grid, but the varied thumbnail sizes emphasize certain projects and break the checkerboard pattern so prevalent in portfolio sites. The site maintains its beautiful simplicity when you start navigating through his body of work, and the images he has provided of the various projects are bold, crisp, and engaging. Overall, the site is strikingly simple, with just enough personality to set it apart from the sea of minimal/thumbnailey portfolio sites out there.

However, the organization of the work is a bit problematic for me. Despite the site’s admirable simplicity, Jez uses three different hierarchical levels one must traverse to see all of his work. Every project gets a page, which is simple enough, but then each project has a different number of elements to it, and some elements have multiple images associated with them that must be clicked through slideshow-style. This combination of scrolling and clicking, coupled with non-descriptive “next project” and “previous project” navigation makes it a bit difficult to look at everything Jez has to offer.

The navigation is my only other issue with his beautiful site. It consists of the word “Profile” and a short row of four icons at the top right of the page. My concerns are that the word “Profile” doesn’t read as clickable, at least until you mouse-over it, and the icons are disconnected from the aesthetic of the page, and therefore you assume will be taking you off-site. In fact, the Tumblr icon takes you to woods.jezburrows.com, Jez’s equally beautifully designed blog, which feels like part of the same site. If not for my thoroughly combing through his site for the purposes of this article, I would have missed it completely.

Criticism aside, Jez’s site and work is phenomenal, and at only two years my senior, he is a big inspiration for me. Make sure to check him out if you haven’t already.

The Office of Feltron

Nick Feltron has long been one of my design heroes, and his Cagro Collective based portfolio is one of my favorites. Its most striking features are the well considered thumbnails, which adhere to the grid but still make effective use of negative space, and the brilliantly simple architecture that allows you to navigate from any one project to any other project. The site does a brilliant job of showing the scope of Feltron’s portfolio.

My only gripe is that a lot of the details of the site don’t get as much attention as they deserve. I am always upset by the fact that the entire header is one, poorly anti-aliased image, when it could be more effectively done with some CSS. Also, the archive and about pages are just plugged into the same system as the work, without much consideration.

If you are not familiar with Nick Feltron’s work, get out from under that rock and start browsing.

Astheria

Astheria is the blog of Kyle Meyer, a user experience designer from Minneapolis. This site differs from those of Mr. Burrows and Mr. Feltron because its main content is text, not images. Kyle has done a wonderful job creating a simple, readable, and engaging layout for his writing. His simple “+” sign branding, used in the site’s mark and patterned in the background, gives the page just the right amount of personality. I am especially fond of his timelined Archives page, which lists his blog posts and articles chronologically, spacing them out based on the number of days in between them.

Kyle has tremendous attention to detail, and there is little to criticize about his site. The large typography doesn’t appear correctly for me in Safari, which I am told is something to do with my version of Helvetica Neue, and doesn’t happen for most users. Make sure to read some of his writing; his article “Portfolios That Accomplish Goals” inspired to me to write what you are reading now!

Gavin Potenza

Gavin Potenza is another young, talented designer that is a great inspiration to me. His recently redesigned portfolio also makes use of the Cagro Collective CMS, and does so beautifully. Though his use of thumbnails is a bit more conventional and “expected”, the little details is where is uniqueness and personality of the site shine through. The small “GP” cipher that keeps a fixed position in your window, the “highlighter” effect on mouse-over of the links, and the rest of the minute details make all the difference in this one. He makes use of a similar navigation to Feltron, which gives the user access to any piece in the portfolio at any time.

As with Astheria, there isn’t much to criticize about Gavin’s site. If anything, its lack of something outstanding or innovative is its only liability. However, as a simple and effective frame for Gavin’s extensive and impressive portfolio, it is successful.

Cynosura

“Alpha Aesthetica” or “Cynosura” is one of the most typographically considered blogs out there in my personal opinion. Raymond Glover clearly spent a lot of time working on the layout for his website, and it shows. The elegant drop caps, taglines, subheadings, beautiful post-specific graphics, and extensive use of pattern give this particular site an air of sophistication and maturity. Every page is specifically considered and the attention to detail is unparalleled; if you haven’t been through it before, give yourself a few minutes and take it all in.

Nathan Borror

Nathan Borror’s full-featured site showcases his design, web development, writing, photography, and anything else he feels like doing. It too is simply designed, and I am sure you are starting to pick up on my personal preferences (white backgrounds, not sucking, etc.). Some highlights of Nathan’s site are the fancy, javascripted, iconographic, rainbowtastic menu on the left side, his project page which features all of the work he chooses to showcase on a single, easy navigated page, and the beautiful icon set he uses to categorize his posts.

In Conclusion

I am excited to get deeper into my own redesign; I expect it to be a big improvement on my current site, which I have grown quite dissatisfied of. I hope this selection of beautiful sites is as inspiring to you as it is to me. If you are the owner/designer of one of the sites I mentioned above, I did not mean to offend with any of my criticisms.

Which is your favorite? Did I forget any sites you would consider to be paradigm portfolios?