Portfolios Online: Digital and Graphic Designers Websites

Rating:
Summary: Terrific Visual Guide
Review: Full of ideas and colorful layouts that help you navigate visually through the maze of creating a website. Great reference tool for showing how designers present their work.

Rating:
Summary: Expected a "Reference Guide", Got a Picture-Book.
Review: I don't know where to begin except to ask what the jacket description has to do with the book?

I was excited about reading this "must-have reference guide" that "focuses on the essential elements that create a successful online portfolio." I expected to see samples of some of the best award-wining online portfolios along with discussions of the salient features that make them so successful and the means by which they were achieved.

I hoped for some descriptions or tips on how winning portfolio designers select and organize content, what types of interfaces and technologies they choose to present their work, how they translate that into success in their fields of work,...

What I got was a (bad) coffee-table book full of screen-shots of web portfolios with little snippets of hyperbole in accompanying blurb-boxes on every other page for the first 2/3 of the book. I never saw such a content-free "reference guide" in my life. Between pages 112 and 154 there is NO TEXT other than 2-word captions to thumbnail-sized website screenshots which are, frankly, a waste of the high-quality glossy stock on which they are printed. They are too small to make out any of the supposed "ooh and ahh" details. Worst of all, what little text there was to read was poorly written - rife with grammatical errors.

This book was an incredible disappointment, very ill-conceived, and falsely advertised. Would someone like to buy my copy?

Rating:
Summary: Expected a "Reference Guide", Got a Picture-Book.
Review: I don't know where to begin except to ask what the jacket description has to do with the book?

I was excited about reading this "must-have reference guide" that "focuses on the essential elements that create a successful online portfolio." I expected to see samples of some of the best award-wining online portfolios along with discussions of the salient features that make them so successful and the means by which they were achieved.

I hoped for some descriptions or tips on how winning portfolio designers select and organize content, what types of interfaces and technologies they choose to present their work, how they translate that into success in their fields of work,...

What I got was a (bad) coffee-table book full of screen-shots of web portfolios with little snippets of hyperbole in accompanying blurb-boxes on every other page for the first 2/3 of the book. I never saw such a content-free "reference guide" in my life. Between pages 112 and 154 there is NO TEXT other than 2-word captions to thumbnail-sized website screenshots which are, frankly, a waste of the high-quality glossy stock on which they are printed. They are too small to make out any of the supposed "ooh and ahh" details. Worst of all, what little text there was to read was poorly written - rife with grammatical errors.

This book was an incredible disappointment, very ill-conceived, and falsely advertised. Would someone like to buy my copy?

Rating:
Summary: Bad purchase
Review: This book has no content. You can barely read a bit about the websites featured there, and most of them are outdated. Although the book is published in 2001, websites there seem to be old.

I didn't agree with the choices of the websites this book features either. It seems like it has been put together by someone who really doesn't spend that much time on the Internet.