Developing Your Online Photography Portfolio

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

In this digital age, it’s increasingly common for artists to host their portfolios online, regardless of their medium of choice. These online portfolios are often the pinnacle of web design, and so the competition is fierce if you’re looking to display your work online. A good photography portfolio should consist of three main things: it should showcase the photographer’s work, provide biographical info about the artist, and share reliable contact information. How you actually present this content, however, is where you can truly run away with your creativity.

Grid Design

The most common photography portfolios feature a grid design. This means that the body of work is displayed in a grid of small thumbnails with the additional navigation options listed in a column beside the grid or in tabs above it. Typically, the thumbnails of your artwork features some flash coding that causes a slightly larger image of the photo to appear when a potential viewer hovers over the image.

This is, perhaps, one of the most readily available templates available on the Internet due to its popularity. Its navigation is intuitive and straightforward, and, although basic, it is nevertheless aesthetically pleasing against a neutral background. Acquiring the coding for this format is typically as easy as searching for an art gallery website template online.

Slideshow

If you don’t necessarily prioritize having all of your work on display at once, a slideshow layout may be ideal for you. A single image is displayed at a time, and the image—through flash or java—gradually changes and cycles through a sequence of images. This is another common design layout, as it highlights the images in a way that draws attention to individual details.

The actual size of the images in the slideshow can vary according to your personal tastes. It’s just as appealing to have a large, nearly full screen image alongside a clean navigation bar and business logo as it is to have a centered slideshow with navigation tabs above the image and content below it. As with the grid layout, this design looks best against a neutral color palette, as this allows your images to be the main focus. Whites, blacks, and grays are especially pleasing, and pops of color can easily be incorporated through the text or your personal icon.

Collage

If you’ve ever tried to hang photos on the wall of your home, or even opened your own gallery, you know how the composition of your work over a space can develop interest just as easily as the composition within the photo itself. Because of this, many photographers have turned to a collage-style layout. It is similar to the grid layout in that it displays a wide variety of images at once. However, rather than thumbnails of a uniform shape and size, the collage uses smaller versions of your images in varying sizes. It also maintains the orientation of the original image, resulting in an eye-pleasing array of vertical and horizontal images. Because magnifying the images with a mouse hover would disrupt the geometry of the layout, this variation tends to feature a side-scrolling action that is either automatic or propelled by keyboard arrow keys.

The post Developing Your Online Photography Portfolio appeared first on Design Inspiration | How to Design a Website.