The Perfect Digital Portfolio

Rating:
Summary: Style Over Substance
Review: The book has no cohesive message. It doesn't provide any guiding principles or other ideas that help photographers or web designers to build digital porfolios. Too much of the text is spent defining basic terms like JPEG and Photoshop and too little teaching relevant principles of design or any other topic that can further various artists understanding of the subject. Furthermore, nearly 1/3 of the book is spent asking the same five interview questions (how many hits do you get a week, how effective is your website at generating clients,) to a series of photographers, web designers, etc. This would be fine except the questions do not help advance any overarching messages in the book either. They seem to just hang there as an interesting side note. It appears that the author was far more interested in designing a interesting looking book than a interesting learning book. Additionally, the page layout varies so significantly from page to page that readers will find it difficult to maintain focus and follow the point.

It is as if the author wrote the book freehand and never sat down to create a outline of the message that he wanted to convey. This shines through from the first page and doesn't stop until the last page. Unfortunately, this means that readers will learn very little on how to build "the perfect digital portfolio."