The Look

In yesterday's post, I mentioned that I needed to come up with the "image" I wanted to portray. Last night and today, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the adjectives I'd like people to use as they describe my electronic portfolio. Since I'll be sharing this creation with academics, I'll want to avoid anything too slick and commerical. I especially want to avoid anything that looks like a gratuitous Flash animation! I think I've settled on "sophisticated elegance" as the look I want the graphic designer to achieve. I think that's appropriate for the audience I'll be trying to reach. If we use CSS I can readily change the look and feel (much like Zen Garden) at some point in the future.

In Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, Jakob Nielsen writes about the allocation of screen real estate (also available on the web). Because my portfolio will primarily focus on content, I need very small navigation and headers. I would like to see a lot of consistency in each header (perhaps a muted graphic of my name?) with a more prominent label of the section name (i.e. narrative, teaching, etc.). The only problem with that idea is that it seems a bit egotistical to have my name plastered all over everything, but I don't have a better idea.