Portfolio 2: Evaluation Portfolios

After two long weeks, at last my portfolio 2 is done! The same goes for the rest of my class, which like me are exhausted from work. We have been assigned to evaluate two of our classmates blogs, so lets take a look:

I will be looking at the portfolio of Denise Blaauwkamer (http://student-kmt.hku.nl/~Denise/) and Ilse Gort. (http://student-kmt.hku.nl/~ilse2/index.html)

Let's start with Denise's site.

My first impression is that the colours certainly fit her name! The blue-grey-white motif reflects her last name 'Blauwkamer.' (Dutch for Blue Room.) These colours are also commonly used in fantasy artwork, fitting her art style nicely.

The glass spheres and decorations appear frequently throughout the site, spreading Denise's spirit throughout. This really makes her site her own.

The banner on top is also very clear. Navigation to the main sites is very easy.

One piece of critisism, however, is that the font is a little dull. With a nicer font, the site would come across much stronger.

Next, let's look at Ilse's site.

Lol, oops. Looks like my browser isn't the right type for viewing her site. She did tell me about this, so this is more my fault than her's. She'll be able to fix this as soon as we have had more HTML classes.

Just like Denise, Ilse picked very good colours for her site, as much of her artwork has lots of blue and grey. Using these colours means that her artwork blends nicely into the site.

The dragon banner is very eye-catching and instantly brings across the kind of artist Ilse is. It also diplayes the quality she is capable of producing, which is very important for a portfolio. The dragon's calm expression gives the site a very plesant and relaxed feeling, again bringing Ilse's personality across through her site's look.

The picture of Ilse in the top corner is a creative way of showing what she looks like. While most students just slap a picture of themselves onto their site, she has incorporated into the site's layout.

Apart from the obvious browser issues, I do have another small improvement suggestion. I wish there was more of her work up on her site. I understand the 'eigen werk' page is coming soon, but there could have been more visual stimulants spread throughout the site. More artwork would make exploring her site a lot more interesting.

Well, those are my evaluations. Good job everyone! All the sites look great!

Portfolio 2 Project: Wireframes

Time to work out the layout of my new portfolio.

I decided to re-use the basic look of my old site, since I was so pleased with the way my site ended up looking and from feedback. The layout of the pages, however, required some work.

The side-bar curtains proved a bit too complicated for me, so I explored other ideas which didn't include this feature.

Sketches.

I liked the navigation bar at the bottom, but this design would be a little too busy in some places and not busy enough in others. I began to explore ways of spreading out the information. I kept coming back to the idea of sidebars and decided that I will have to use them. I'd simply have to put aside some time into working out how to programme them.

Getting there...

Bingo! This was it. (Notice I worked out roughly how many pixels would be needed.)

Here are the final layouts to give you a visual idea what my site will look like.

Final Personas

I finally have all my interviews, so I got around to making my personas: a 10 year-old boy, an average Game Art Student and a Teacher at the HKU.

Persona 1:

Name: Jamie Koning

Age: 10

Family: Mom, dad, 2 brothers (12 and 20) and 2 cats

Favorite Colours: Black, blue, red

Favorite Games: Call of Duty, Habbo Hotel, Skull-Kid

Most frequently browsed websites: Mondo mini shows, Habbo hotel, Speeleiland

Likes: Lego, playing video games, watching violent cartoons online, laser-gaming, skateboarding.

Dislikes: Homework, vegetables, Justin Bieber

Personal Quote: Live long as prosper

Interesting notes:

- Often plays games at school when he should be working.

- Likes to meet friends online so he can beat them at games.

- His favorite movie is Alien VS Predator.

- Oldest brother studies Game Design.

- Usually hangs out with lots of boys at school.

One reason for wanting to design for kids is that at my old school there was a big group of kids who really liked my work. They knew the names of all my characters and used to ask me pretty much every day if I'd drawn anything new. I have some really detailed characters I developed as a result of these kid's interest. I still remember them argueing over little details about the characters: 'No! Doctor Guy's real name is Rudolf Gaylord, not Rudy!' And other things like that. I know they'll want to see my portfolio when its online and keep abreast of what I'm up to.

Persona 2:

Name: Jan van Wijk

Age: 19

Studies: Videogame Art, first year

Family: Mom, Dad, little sister (13) older brother (22) and a rabbit.

Favorite Colours: Black, purple, silver

Favorite Games: Starcraft II, Zelda, Kingdom Hearts

Most frequently browsed websites: DeviantART, Kotaku.com, Conceptart.org

Likes: Ren & Stimpy, drawing, listening to music, gaming, watching movies

Dislikes: Lady Gaga, drawing backgrounds, Facebook

Personal Quote: IT’S OVER 9000!!!

Interesting notes:

- Has dyslexia

- Drinks too much caffeine

- Likes to cosplay and is very fanatical in his interests.

- Has never taken up a sport. (Not including mandatory PE classes in high school.)

- Is very silly, but can be very serious and ambitious when it comes to doing schoolwork.

This persona was probably the easiest, because its basically just me and my friends mixed together. Not really a lot of thought needed in order for this to be convincing.

Persona 3:

Name: Yolanda Bitters

Age: 43

Occupation: Teacher at the HKU

Family: None

Favorite Colours: Grey

Favorite Games: Isn’t a gamer

Most frequently browsed websites: Hotmail, Google

Likes: Correct grammar and spelling

Dislikes: Late assignments, Students who don’t read their instructions properly, hip-hop

Personal Quote: Do, or do not. There is no 'try.' -Jedi Master Yoda

Interesting notes:

- Will automatically give a student a fail if they use Comic-Sans font in an assignment.

- Wants student’s work to be very clear and concise with no unnecessary text to pad it.

- Believes giving a student a short deadline will force them to work harder.

- Is very critical of student’s work: Yolanda believes that then students will try even harder to do better next time.

- Favorite animal is the spider

Ok, I'd like to make it VERY clear that my teachers are not like this! In fact, this persona is the opposite of the teachers I interviewed. Literally all the teachers at the HKU are hip, funny, chirpy, cool, lovely people with families and interesting careers. For motivation, however, its better to pretend that my teachers are jerks. This way I'll be forced into trying to please people who are never satisfied. One similarity between my persona and my teachers is that they are both difficult to please and pretty critical. My persona acts this way because she is a jerk, while my teachers do it because they want us to do well. I know they know what they're talking about, they know they know what they're talking about, so I'm making it clear I know they know they know what they're talking about.

...

Maybe this is a bit demented, but it works for me!

Portfolio Project 2: Interviews Docenten

Interview 1

Name

Rens Marten

Age

32

Profession

Teacher Grafische onderwerp at the HKU, typographist, owner of graphical development company ‘Rens.’

Academic training

Beeldende kunsten at the HKU

Personal quote

'Do or do not. There is no try.' - Jedi Master Yoda

Favorite colour

Blue

Hobby

Collecting Hip-hop

3 words to discribe Rens Marten

umm… typographist…teacher and…

Most visited websites

Nu.nl, Hotmail, online CD shops.

- Believes site’s look or navigation isn’t as important as its functionality.

- Tends to look at a website’s pictorial content, then the text.

- Finds results more important than process

- Not a gamer

- Likes nice typography in a site.

- Encourages artists to only upload best work.

- From a site, I expect to know where I am and who’s site it is.

Interview 2

Name

Ton Markus

Age

41

Family

Married with 2 kids

Occupation

Director of one-man company for CSS programming, HTML teacher at HKU

Interests

Making efficient websites, tools for making sites

Personal quote

Anything you can explain to a computer is science, the rest is art.

Favorite websites

Daring Fireball, Roughly Drafted.

Worst Personal Feature

Has trouble letting go of things.

Favorite colour

(Looks at orange shirt)

- Believes the purpose of a portfolio is to see what the student is up to.

- Hates when he can’t find what he’s looking for in a site, since this is the purpose of a website.

- Is a teacher at the HKU because he was asked. (Joking.) He always wanted to be a teacher and likes to teach college students because he knows we want to learn. (Compared to, say, high school students, who have to be there.)

- Only teaches one day a week

- Likes to delve into and learn about new ideas and goings-on in the technology world. (EG: relationships/arguments between Apple, Adobe, etc.)

- As long as you can still read it, grammar and spelling are not important to Ton. Likes information to be concise and to the point: no bullshit padding.

- When Ton works, he storms his customer’s brain so he can know exactly what they want. Some customers don’t like this, because they feel then that they’re paying for nothing.

- Ton can work in a team: he works with the University of Utrecht and other companies on a daily basis.

- Has a deep dislike for Comic Sans font. He feels it instantly undermines the content of a page.

Interview 3

Name

Joeri Lefeure

Age

24

Job

Teacher at HKU, freelance art, Monkey Business (concept art company) 2 days a week.

Interests

Drawing, drinking, chess, watching films, playing guitar, music, NOT sport

3 words that describe Joeri

Troublesome, ‘eigenwijs,’ (does their own thing) dyslexic

Frequently visited sites

Gmail, art blogs

Personal quote

When something’s good, something’s good.

- Artwork on a website should, if possible, have no text. The art should speak for itself.

- Composition and navigation are very important in a site and shouldn’t be too cluttered. Should also fit context.

- Hates advertisements on sites, as well as broken links and pages that take unnecessarily long to get to.

- Artwork in a portfolio will be the first thing to catch Joeri’s attention.

- Impulse is as important as planning in art

- Has dyslexia

- Feels he is a concrete person

- Likes to work in a team, except when doing personal work, like painting.

- Uses Google Chrome and has a Mac Pro.

- Is an artist because he likes to make things he internally finds beautiful and gives lessons because he likes to offer wisdom externally.

- Doesn’t mind humor in a website’s text, as long as it’s appropriate. (Not in articles about cancer.)

I'm lucky to have such hip teacher. ;)

Portfolio Project 2: Student Interviews

Another day, even more interviews. Today I interviewed some students at school. Lucky for me, I know what these people like, because I'm one of them. Nevertheless, its handy to have a broader knowledge of my generation's interests.


Interview 1

Name
Alexander Chiho Ho

Age
22

Subject/Year
Game Art, Year 1

Interests
Watching Starcraft II tournaments on YouTube, drawing

Hobbies
Drawing, collecting art books

Family
My mom, dad, 20 year old brother, 2 parakeets and fish.

Which sites do you visit most?
YouTube, Facebook, DeviantART

What are your favorite games?
Halo, Modern Warfare II, Starcraft II

Which 3 words best describe you?
Insane, grumpy, eccentric


Interview 2

Name
Peter Klyn

Age
21

Subject/Year
Game Art, year 2

Interests
Games, films, art, entertainment

Hobbies
Going to movies, drawing, listening to music

Family
Mother and father: other siblings have moved out already

Which sites do you visit most?
Conceptart.org, Kotaku.com

What are your favorite games?
Dawn of War II, the Zelda series, Beyond Good and Evil

Which 3 words best describe you?
Chaotic, traditional, apple-pie


Interview 3

Name
Joris van Leeuwen

Age
18

Subject/Year
Game design/development, year 2

Interests
Drawing, programming, surfing the net

Hobbies
Drawing, programming

Family
Mom, dad, 5 year old brother and 4 cats

Which sites do you visit most?
Google, school project art blogs

What are your favorite games?
Kingdom Hearts, Uncharted, Starcraft

Which 3 words best describe you?
Sporty, fanatical, ambitious

There isn't really a lot of in-depth analysis needed here. I know these kinds of people and what they like, because I'm one too. (Minus the point-and-click adventure games and old-granny music tastes.) This persona shouldn't be too difficult to create.

Tomorrow I'll interview the rest of my teachers so I can finally begin on the personas.

Portfolio project 2: Personas

Week one’s portfolio project is FINALLY over and already we’ve been given more work. They sure keep us busy here at school. (I love it.) We now have to continue the development of our site by creating three personas and developing our site around these people. We have to interview 3 teachers, 3 students and 3 other people outside of school.
Since my website is already going to prioritize people like my teachers and schoolmates, I decided to interview children as my ‘3 other people.’

A lot of my work and tastes are influenced by experiences I had when I was around eight years old. Taking into account what children of this age like could be useful in designing my website. It is around the age of ten that children begin to develop their own personal tastes in things, so looking at what they like now might be a good indicator of what they well like in future. This is only a theory, so could be proven untrue. At any rate, I can at least have nostalgia-appeal.
Lucky for me, yesterday was my brother’s 10th birthday party and he invited lots of 8-10 year old test subjects for me. These boys would be better to interview than girls, because my tastes are more like that of little boys than girls. (No offense, every single girl at the HKU!) All of them where gamers and we were going to go lazergaming later that day, so these guys where obviously cool people. Another point to make is that these boys are either Dutch or go to a Dutch school. They are also all friends.
Interview questions where difficult to plan, because they couldn’t be too complicated, yet give me some useful information. Here are the results:



Interview 1


What’s your name?
Wouter te Pas

How old are you?
8

What three colours do you think are pretty?
Black, red, blue

What games do you think are cool?
Wii games. My favorite is De Blob.

What websites do you think are cool?
Debbo Hotel, Habbo Hotel.

Why do you think those sites are cool?
You can meet other people and beat them.



Interview 2


What’s your name?
Tom Heady-Carroll

How old are you?
10

What three colours do you think are pretty?
Red, Purple, Blue

What games do you think are cool?
Godzilla Save the Earth, Lego Starwars, Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi

What websites do you think are cool?
Lego.com, Cartoon Network, Warner Brothers

Why do you think those sites are cool?
They’re just really fun. I can play games with my favorite characters in them.



Interview 3


What’s your name?
Floris Koning

How old are you?
8

What three colours do you think are pretty?
Red, Black, Blue

What games do you think are cool?
Starwars games, Habbo Hotel and Call of Duty, Skull-Kid

What websites do you think are cool?
Spelen.nl, Speeleiland.nl, YouTube,Mondo Mini Shows

Why do you think those sites are cool?
They are aggressive and have fights in them, which is cool.



Interview 4


What’s your name?
Jeroen te Pas

How old are you?
10

What three colours do you think are pretty?
Red, Black, Blue

What games do you think are cool?
Habbo Hotel, Debbo Hotel, Zwaarden en Sandalen

What websites do you think are cool?
Habbo Hotel, Debbo Hotel, Speeleiland

Why do you think those sites are cool?
You can buy things and play things.


Something immediately apparent is how much these guys like red black and blue. All of them listed these three colours, with the exception of Tom who picked purple over black. Since these kinds of colours appeal to ten year old gamers, it might be worth using these colours in my site.

Knowing which sites they like means I can look at these sites for inspiration. Most of them visit Dutch game-portals, like Speeleiland.nl and Spelen.nl. (This is also where mosty of their favorite games can be found. I think this is because most of these kids are too young to have their own consoles.) These are among the first sites listed when the word ‘Spelen’ is Googled, which highlights how important it is to have your site listed first. These kids are pretty young, so chances are that their parents found these sites for them. When marketing to children of such an age, it should be taken into account that parents will more often than not govern what their children play. If you have a site with chainsaws and guns on the front page, the parents will be less likely to show the site to their children. (These can be on other pages. ;P)

Another powerful force is kids telling each other about sites. Floris, who is one of the older boys I interviewed, has explored the internet on his own and discovered more conventionally cool things: violent entertainment, such as Happy Tree Friends. I remember being introduced to Happy Tree-Friends through friends in the computer lab when we were supposed to be doing homework when I was ten. I expect Floris’ introduction was similar. Another example of the power of friends and community is the popularity of Habbo Hotel and Debbo Hotel. Communication through the internet has a unique novelty to kids. I’m currently working in the library and all around me I can see children playing Runescape and text-chatting to each other, even though they are sitting right next to each other.

I’m going a little off-topic now. I’m looking at site design, NOT site content. Its still interesting to know what these kid’s interests are.

This is just my first observations. Tomorrow I’m getting an introduction to portfolio 2 and should get some more information on Personas.

First Assignment: Portfolio Project (part 2)

1 September 2010

The next day, I was finally able to really start work on the html. I went to school early to scan and fix up my traditional work in Photoshop so it would be ready to use.


After art class, I went to the computer lab and polished my site. I didn’t do too much work, because I wanted to be back home for my little brother’s 10th birthday. After some cake, I continued to touch up my site and write a lot of the text into the wee-hours of the morning. (I’m so screwed tomorrow morning, but I need to be done tonight. Its 3:45 AM as I write this. Ach.)

Here’s a screenshot of my final results. It isn’t quite what I originally set out to do, but I’m pretty pleased with the results. I realized that this assignment will be assessed on the site’s ease of navigation and our us demonstrating the html coding we learned in class. Due to time constraints, I was unable to include everything I wanted, such as different font and a propper white box around the text. I focused more on its look, which may have been a bad idea since my teachers don’t expect anything extraordinary from a bunch of newbie programmers. I also should have invested time in exploring several ideas, rather than putting all my eggs into one basket and running with my first idea. I need to learn to stick to a quota, explore lots of ideas and make the most of limitations. This is a common problem when I start a project and I seriously need to work on this. I nevertheless hope my teachers are at least satisfied enough with my results to give me a passing grade. (If your a teacher reading this now, I'll try harder in future, I promise!)





I’m tired…

First Assignment: Portfolio Project (part 1)

Our first assignment at the HKU is to create our own online portfolio in three days. Its a chance for us to apply design thinking applied to web design, learn the basics of html and a basis for our final professional portfolio.

I've wanted to make a site for a while now and knew roughly what I wanted already. An artist's site should reflect their work. Going on what others have said about my work, I suppose my site should be a little dark and bizarre.
When I was little, my parents took me to Il Florilegio di Darix Togni; an Italian traveling circus. Its best act was a leopard and an acrobat riding on a rhino. That’s how bloody awesome it was. I came very close to running away with that circus, but I was worried my parents would miss me or think I was in danger. The experience has never the less stuck with me like a parasitic twin and ever since I’ve been very fascinated by circuses. Circuses are a place of delight, yet have eerie connotations which I feel reflects my work in some ways. I often draw things because I think they’re funny, which isn’t always a good thing due to my dark sense of humor. This is why I think the circus theme is appropriate for my site.

31 August 2010
The first step in all my artistic processes is research. In retrospect, this was probably a very bad place to start. Instead, I should have started on my wireframe and html coding. I am much less experienced in programming and resulted in a bad crunch trying to finish because I spent too long on the look of my site.
Moral of the story: always start with the things you’re worst at. It’s much better for your time management.

Anyway, here are some photographic references I used in my mood board:

Looking at my mood board, desaturated reds, greens and blues with off-white and gold are colours seemed appropriate for the look of the site. Stripes, cursive fonts and decorative frills bulbs and other details are also commonly apparent in circuses. I tried to incorporate these into my final design.
After researching and building a loose idea in my head, it was time to put pen to paper. I wanted my site to have a certain hand-made look to it, since I am an artist. I have also done circus themed work in Photoshop before and felt it would have looked more authentic if it was done traditionally. Blatantly ignoring the assignment sheet’s suggestion that the style of the site doesn’t matter, I played with some ideas in my sketchbook and developed my site’s look and colour pallet further, thus wasting more of my precious time when I should have been programming. (Detecting the dry cynicism yet?)

So basically my idea was to have a white and red background with two curtains on either side of the screen. In front of these would be light bulb studded signs as links to other web pages. The text would be in white boxes in the center of the screen so it would be clearly visible.

Later that day, we had a session where we could work on programming our site. I realized in after trying for an hour to program a sidebar that my design was WAAAY to advance considering my experience in html. (0% to be exact.) It was this point that I realized I had perhaps invested too much time into my site’s look rather than just getting the bloody thing done. After the little programming I could do, it was back to the drawing board; I drew up my wireframe and began to simplify my design, as the deadline was but a few days away and I knew I could never get it done in time at this rate.

Finally, I had something much more doable, but still quite nice looking. Simple links to pages containing text with nice hand-made backgrounds and back buttons. This gave me more time to focus on just working out how to program basic html. That night I had to babysit my little sister, so couldn’t actually start programming yet. So instead, I worked on the traditionally crafted parts of the site.

Thus concludes day 1. Click here for part 2!

An Interview with Ilse 'Lhune' Gort

Ilse Gort (aka Dragoness77) is a friend and very talented classmate of mine at the HKU. I really admire her work, because she isn't your dime-a-dozen fantasy artist. She is able to create very realistic work, yet incorporate so much imagination and original ideas. Ever since I met her at the toelatingsdag at school, I've been inspired to work on my realism and to look to the natural work for inspiration. I interviewed her at school and asked her a couple of questions about her work.

What do find important when you are designing a character?
What I probably find most important when I’m designing a character is to make it both appealing and easy to read to the public. That doesn’t necessarily mean realistic, but it has to be memorable. Having said that, I definitely prefer realism over any other style. To me it’s important that a character is anatomically convincing and I also prefer simplicity over extremely detailed designs. The impact a character has should not depend on its accessories but on its base design.

Why did you choose to study Game Art?

I chose to study Game Art because I’m passionate about creating art and I’m passionate about games which lead to Game Art being the perfect direction for me. I’d love to improve my drawing skills with the help of trained professionals, I feel I could really use the guidance. At the same time I would enjoy learning more about games and how people experience them, as well as how to create that experience.

What games influence you?

The games that influenced me both in my art as well as my preferences are Heroes of Might and Magic II and III, Black & White, Warcraft III and Call of Duty 2. I played many more games but I couldn’t name a particular favorite, because my taste in games changes over time. I named these four however because they stuck with me the most and had some kind of influence on either my art or my taste in games. The first three games I listed influenced my artwork in the sense that they got me into designing characters, creatures and environments. They were also a great inspiration to me. I simply had to add Call of Duty 2 to the list due to the many hours I spent on that game, as well as the fact that it was my first ever shooter (a game type which I always swore not to play) and it opened up my eyes on different game types. It taught me not to judge a game too quickly and got me into trying and discovering different games which I would not have played otherwise.

Ilse Gort is a fantastic artist and a lovely person. If you haven't already, I highly reccomend you check her stuff out! You can visit her deviantART account here. She is also active on Conceptart.org under the name Lhune. (Her account is here. )

Well...

...I'm in the HKU.

Tomorrow I start my life as an art student studying Game Art. I've worked hard to get this far and I'm very fortunate to have made to where I am now. Will I achieve my dreams of being a concept artist? In four years, will I read this first post and laugh at my nervousness, or be upset by my naive optimism?

School will be tough and I'll have to work really hard to achieve my dreams. Well, I have four words to say about the enormous amount of work ahead of me: BRING IT ON MOFO!