This is the final draft of the portfolio site I'm making in my Internet Design 1 class.

After asking several friends, peers, and the instructor, I decided to go with this one.

I bounced a few other very similar layouts off of them (mostly just changing which sides things were on), and it was very interesting. 100% of the people I showed the designs to really liked them, which is always great. But what was interesting was when I asked them which layout was their favorite, they pretty much all would point to exactly two. Not one, not three. Two. And when I asked them why they picked the ones they did, they were all able to explain why.

When my class and the instructor overwhelmingly went with the first layout (which is the one you're looking at), I decided to go with that one. My instructor actually stood up and explained how my design was, "a fantastic example of when breaking some of the common layout 'rules' can be done and be a good thing," referring to how the strong elements are on the right instead of the left.

One of the people who looked at that one felt that it was too right-side heavy though. The other people I had shown hadn't felt that way (later, two of them specifically said that they liked having the thumbnails on the left of the box instead of the right), but I actually agreed with the person who said it was too right-heavy anyway. That was why I had begun to experiment with flipping the layout around a few different ways in the first place.

But then I thought about it more and realized that there were a few reasons why the layout was probably not right-heavy after all. The portfolio pieces that are farthest to the left happen to be mostly white, so they aren't as "heavy" when it comes to balancing things out. Use your imagination to swap the thumbnails from 2008 with the ones from 2009, since the ones from 2008 happen to be heavier in the way that I mean, and I think that if you were feeling like it was right-heavy that you won't feel that way anymore. So in other words, the solution will be to reconsider which thumbnails to use and where to put them, but to keep this layout.

Another one of the criticisms that I feel is interesting enough to talk about is from a different person who liked the layout, but felt that using wood was getting a little bit common on the web. Once again, this was a criticism that I felt was good, but aside from the person making the criticism and myself, other people didn't agree with. I had bounced a few other designs using different types of wood in the header, and 100% of them liked this one.

I didn't tell any of them then that of the ones I showed them, this one was the one that actually made me feel, "This looks like what a lot of photographers seem to always be going for" because I still liked this one, so when I heard the new person tell me they felt that way too, I couldn't help but smile. But alas, I still liked it and so did they, and that plus the fact that everybody else loved it too but without even having that criticism made me decide that it would probably be best to stick with it. The nice thing about this design though is that I can very easily swap it out with other things in the future or have multiple versions at the same time for people to choose between.

Thank you to everybody who gave me some feedback while I worked on this! You were all very positive and constructive at the same time, and you can't really ask for more than that!