Brand Designer / Illustrator Portfolio Review

Hello there, new to this space and interested in any insight as to how I can improve my web presence and portfolio. I’m a brand marketing graphic designer and illustrator with loads of experience but have been unable to secure interviews and jobs for the last 9 months. I get the feeling like there is something that immediately turns off hiring managers and I’m trying to get insight as to what that is. Let me know any issues or confusion you had while browsing. Please be brutally honest but also constructive with your criticisms. Thank you!

Be aware that this website also doubles as a freelance design site with examples under services. Drawbot Design is a brand I’ve cultivated and that has brand awareness in my area.

Welcome, David!
You’ve got an impressive website there!

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Here are my thoughts.

  1. I think you have some nice work, but the presentation is overwhelming.
  2. You are showing way too much.
  3. Also, the above the fold section of the home page is a little all over the place. I think you could benefit if you took another look at it and tried to focus a little more.
  4. In my opinion, you have to be very careful mixing sans serif fonts. I don’t think having Futura as the display font and then going to whatever it is you’re using for the body copy is working.

Bottom line: I’d say you have talent, and you have some nice work; but it seems like you threw everything at your website, and it would benefit from editing and refinement.

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At a quick glance I will generally echo what others have said and add a few other points.

  • All in all good work. Curating things down to your top 6-8 pieces/campaigns will help.
  • Way too much movement and animation, IMO. It comes across as movement just for movement’s sake instead of with purpose. It is very distracting.
  • A lot of inconsistent web layouts. I get a general sense of a grid, but spacing, margins, columns, font sizes, colors, etc. seems to be all over the map. The overall website is visually jarring in some ways because of that and it detracts from any focus on the actual work you are trying to present.
  • Also, somewhat disjointed, but IMO including your caricature work and children’s book illustration info is overkill. I mean, if you want to include it as some bulleted additional info to know about you, maybe, but when I go to you site am I looking to hire a caricature artist, a children’s book illustrator, a branding expert, a designer, a web designer, someone to commission a character?
  • fonts are tiny on some secondary pages
  • on your AWS video game example, when I clicked into the visuals I had no way of “getting out” of looking at the visuals.
  • And fairly minor in the grand scheme of things but on your home page where you state “Here’s a couple of brands I’ve designed…” the grammar is off since that would be “Here is a couple of brands I’ve designed…” and IMO , and I’m having trouble putting this into the correct words, but neither are truly brands that you’ve designed. One, a brand isn’t designed, per se, but created. To me those would be branding projects you’ve worked on, but in the case of AWS, you didn’t design the brand. You may have worked on the branding for the certification project, but not for AWS. You (I assume) still were working within Amazon’s larger branding architecture. For Tu Simple, perhaps it was a larger brand rollout and development.

If your focus is landing a job, make your website hyper focused, easily navigable, streamlined, etc. As a hiring manager I’m not going to spend 5 minutes poking around and trying to find what I’m looking for.

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Just echoing what everyone else has said. Pretty good review and exactly my points also.

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Between @Steve_O and @CraigB, they pretty much covered it. I agree with what they’ve written.

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Bah, I meant to say Futura for the display font and the other sans for the body copy is not working.

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Isn’t it “Here are a couple of brands I’ve designed…”
?

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Thank you for your helpful input. I think you nailed some key areas I could improve. This website is a 3rd iteration and I’ve had trouble making it all fit together as I try to salvage parts that did and didn’t work from previous versions.
I’ve agonized over what to put above the fold for a while, previous versions had a stylized photo of me with the introduction, but I wanted something eye-catching though I think busy does qualify here. Given my aesthetic and work, do you have any suggestions for the type of content that could work best here above the fold, given that I want to lead into the brand & case study sections below?

Wow, thank you so much for the very specific and helpful breakdown of some issues here. I think there’s a lot of insight I can take from this going forward. As I mentioned in other comments, this is an amalgamation of trying to redo this site 3 different times this past year and I think it shows. I will do some work to streamline.

I guess it’s a bit unclear about my work on the particular brand itself, but in both instances of companies I worked for, I underwent the entire rebranding process including selecting colors, adopting fonts and direction from central brand and previous iterations to make a full brand guidelines and stylized system. I helped make the brand guidelines I put in there and helped the stakeholders choose from the options presented to me so I would say 90% of the content in there was “designed” or brought together and tested by me. (Again, I’m claiming my work on the AWS Training & Certification brand, not AWS brand. I was the only designer on that sub-team at the time) I don’t want to be misleading in my active role but I really do feel like these brands were built up from scratch by me, for as much as a brand is built by a designer with logo/color/font/direction can be so I wanted to focus on those as being part of a larger strategic output which I’ve fostered as my designer specialty. Maybe terminology is important here so I think saying “here’s some brand ecosystems I’ve built” would be better?

Also, I did catch that there is an upper-right “X” on the video game case study page for the lightbox but it’s dark grey and almost impossible to see. Good catch!

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