Digital portfolio

The first task for the digital portfolio was to make a mock up featuring the book that we designed for the penguin book cover design award. We used photoshop to upload the covers that we created onto the template for the hardcover that we had downloaded previously. We needed to adapt the covers slightly, as the format of this template and the one from the penguin cover design website have slightly different dimensions. I used the photoshop clone tool to expand the pink that surrounds the cover, so that there would not be so much empty negative space around the main image.

I experimented a bit with the colours in the background, to see the difference that that might make to the way it looks for the portfolio.

I also created a mock up for the alternative book cover that I first created for this project.

Seeing the work mocked up like this really gives an idea on the direction we will be going in for the digital portfolio. It is also a satisfying ending to the cover design award project, to see our work mocked up like this, showing further the potential of the work.

Inspiration for portfolio website

Before are a few examples of the portfolio websites I've had a look at and gained inspiration from. When exploring different sites, these caught my eye because of factors such as the layout of the work, or the work itself, as well as the overall aesthetic of the portfolios.

Logo, font and text

For the digital portfolio that we will be creating, we need to make a logo that can be used to represent us as artists. I enjoy creating hand lettered fonts, so for me making the font by hand is what immediately comes to mind when deciding what to create for the website. We had a look at the website for House industries, to gain inspiration for the fonts and lettering that we will be making for our own work.

Below I took a drawing I made in my sketchbook, scanned it and used photoshop to give it a cleaner and more professional look.

In one of our printmaking sessions, we had the opportunity to create linocut self portraits of ourselves that we could potentially use for our digital portfolios. I made two portraits of myself, one hand drawn on the line, and the other traced using a printed out photo of myself. I feel that the first one, drawn by hand shows more of my character than the other one.

For the logo, we looked at different typography. Because the main image that I wanted to use for the logo was one of my linocut portraits, I wanted to find something that would fit the same style as that. I searched google to see if a font would match what I was looking for, something that might look like it was cut from lino itself, but I found it hard to find anything I could use. We also looked at a website called https://ifonts.xyz/ , where it would be possible for us to download fonts for free, and search for ones that are relevant to us. Searching for lino kind of fonts wasn't successful, as I think it was too niche, but I found a few and experimented with them next to the portraits.

Below are the final concepts for the logo. I chose a font that I like and then uploaded the lino portrait onto photoshop. I chose yellow as the background colour, as this is my favourite colour, and one I felt suited the aesthetic of my artwork, and website that I intended on creating.

For the website we are making for the digital portfolio, we decided to use squarespace. The website gives us the opportunity to make a professional online portfolio to display our work, and a website with already built in templates and formats that we can use to insert our work, which we can then adapt to whatever we want the site to look like.